collaborative project Archives - Secondary Sparks

How to Celebrate Women’s History Month in Science Class

Michelle Rudolph — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 17:00:28 +0000

As March approaches, you may start thinking about Women’s History Month and how you can infuse that in your science class. Yes, we should be celebrating women in science all year round, not just in March but Women’s History Month gives us an opportunity to highlight women in all fields of STEM including mathematics, astronomy, biology, engineering, marine science, physics, geology, medicine and beyond. Teaching science allows us the opportunity to inspire the next generation of scientists. These activities will give you an idea of how you can celebrate women’s history in science class with enthusiasm and in a way that honors the achievements of amazing women in STEM!

Activities to Celebrate Women’s History Month in Science

Highlighting Women in STEM:

For all of March, you can choose a different woman in science who has had an impact in the STEM field. Incorporate this into your warm ups, exit tickets or find a way to infuse them into the topic you are teaching. If you are teaching about space, think about women such as Mae Jemison or Sally Ride to talk about. It doesn’t always have to be a completely new lesson! Here are some books about women in the marine science field or written by women.

Guest Speakers:

Find a woman in the STEM field to talk to your class. Find someone local who can hop on a virtual Zoom call or can come in to talk to your students. A local engineer, doctor, scientist or mathematician. Just reach out and ask! They can share their career path, experiences, answer questions and provide real-world insight into STEM careers.

STEM Challenges:

Think of different experiments of STEM challenges that can be tied into a discovery or invention from a female in STEM. This gives your students a hands-on approach to learning while still highlighting the achievements of a woman in that particular field. Students can explore and innovate based on the challenges faced by women in their career, making the learning more meaningful for them.

Career Panels:

Group students into panels to discuss different careers in the STEM field. They can discuss the different careers, education and highlight women who have had success within those fields. This allows students to gain insight into potential career paths.

Women in Science Brochure Project

This Women in STEM Brochure Project can be used in any middle school or high school STEM class. Students choose a woman to focus on and create a brochure that is based on that woman and her accomplishments in their field. They research their life, education, career, notable awards, innovations, discoveries and more. Students can complete their brochure on paper or in Google Classroom. Allow students to present their brochure. This can give students the opportunity to learn about more than one influential woman in STEM. Once the project is completed, they can be added to a bulletin board or a hallway to celebrate Women’s History Month. But as always, you can celebrate women in STEM anytime during the year!

The post How to Celebrate Women’s History Month in Science Class appeared first on Secondary Sparks.

Creating a Collaborative Project about Marine Vertebrates

Michelle Rudolph — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 18:52:27 +0000

If we are being honest, you could spend an entire year teaching all of the different marine vertebrate species and animals! But with a school year, as you know, time is limited. This is how the Marine Vertebrates ABC book was born. I wanted to give my students the opportunity to learn about a marine species of their choice and go deeper with their learning – without it consuming too much time.

I also wanted to have a project the whole class could take part in as a collaborative effort. To accomplish both of these tasks, we created a children’s book as a class: The ABCs of Marine Vertebrates.

How to Set up the Marine Vertebrates Project

The good news is that this project is pretty simple to put together. The bad news? Your students might struggle to pick one marine vertebrate. There are so many to choose from!

Assign each student a letter. Or have students pick a letter. If there are more letters in the alphabet than students in your class, you can always assign those leftover letters to a few students as extra credit.

Pick an animal. Next, have students pick a marine vertebrate that begins with the letter they were assigned. This can be a challenge for some letters, so I let them use the scientific name or the common name, which gives them a bit of flexibility.

Gather information. Once they’ve picked their marine vertebrates, students will fill out the full taxonomy (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species) and draw a picture. I also ask them to add any fun facts and key information they learn about their species as well.
Color the page. The last step for students is to color their page. I ask them to make it look nice and presentable, just like a real book would be! Then you can laminate the pages and bind them, or put them into sheet protectors and store them inside of a binder.

Ideas for How to Extend this Project

You can take this marine vertebrate project even further with a few extension activities.

One of my favorite ways to extend this project is to give our book creation to a local elementary school. If you do this, you can have students write a letter to go with the gift, explaining why the book was created.

You can also have students scale their pages into posters and hang them in the classroom or the hallway. This makes for great decor for next school year.

If you have a good chunk of time to commit to this project, put students into small groups and have each group create their own Marine Vertebrate ABC book.

Another way to extend this project is to have students present their pages! It’s fun to see them share their thinking, and the kids love seeing everyone else’s pages.

Whether you choose to extend this activity or keep it as-is, it’s a fun and engaging way to dig a little bit deeper during your marine vertebrates unit! Your students will enjoy getting to learn more about a specific species and will have the chance to learn collaboratively with others.

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