Starting with the 2007-08 school, schools must test science knowledge to be in compliance with NCLB. So the goggles, test tubes, and slimy critters are coming out all over:
Around Maryland, school districts are getting ready: Anne Arundel County schools are buying new textbooks and materials for many of their science classes. Carroll County schools are putting much of their science curriculum online. As in Baltimore County, Howard County and Baltimore City schools are working to incorporate science into reading and math lessons, and vice versa, so that no subject suffers as a result of spending more time on another. In Howard schools, for example, students read technical science material...
No Child Left Behind will require students to be tested in science one time each in elementary, middle and high school. The federal law passed in 2001 leaves it to the states to decide whether scores on the science tests will contribute to the formula that determines whether a school has made "adequate yearly progress." Like most states, Maryland has decided it won't, but nevertheless will set passing scores and publish the test results...
Last spring, Baltimore County held its first elementary school science, engineering and technology fair. This school year, third-graders at several dozen schools will build race cars for eggs, a project that combines math and physics. Two portable planetariums are making the rounds at elementary schools around the county.
Also this year, all 8,000 fifth-graders in Baltimore County are participating in a new outdoor environmental education program. Each fifth-grade class is to take a daylong field trip during a 10-day unit on forest, beach, wetland and shallow-water ecosystems.
One recent Thursday at Miami Beach Park in Bowleys Quarters, fifth-graders from Battle Grove Elementary got to hold the silverside fish and baby striped bass they'd caught before putting them back in the water. They watched a water snake and measured water temperature and salinity. They marveled at the size of a dragonfly's jaw, concluding that the insect had to be a predator.
Clayton McKenzie, 10, was having a blast. "You get to walk around and actually see things," he said.
Can't think of a more apt description of good science education for youngsters than that.
Posted by kswygert at October 4, 2004 02:43 PM