Books & CDs

Science for Every Learner

Improve your students test scores with Science for Every Learner.

Combine inquiry-based learning and alternative assessments to increase real scientific understanding. You’ll have an outline for setting teaching goals. Plus, you get a format for making sure activities are aligned with your objectives. Science for Every Learner is specifically designed to help link your curriculum to National Science Education Standards.

Find the most successful approaches to optimize learning multiple intelligences, accelerated learning, performance tasks, and ongoing assessment all in this handy book and 74 minute CD with songs, stories and plays.

Take advantage of lesson plans for applying learning theories in your science class. Make your own multifaceted lesson plans for science or other topics using the model. Your students will be hooked on science with exciting units that engage and inspire curiosity.

Units include:

  • Science as Inquiry
  • Electricity
  • Sound
  • Living Things

Teaching with Science for Every Learner helps you deepen students comprehension of the material. Hands-on projects and activities lead students to make individual connections to what they learn. They can apply their understanding and continue to build their science knowledge base with:

  • Stories
  • Songs
  • Plays
  • Experiments
  • Journals
  • Portfolios

Guaranteed to keep you and your students singing and remembering science concepts long after the music is gone!

Assessment Techniques

The idea of assessment strikes fear in the hearts of many people. This book if filled with ways to shift assessment from a source of fear to an energizing and motivating force for teachers and students. 

Based on a graduate education course of the same name, this book’s viewpoint is that the primary purpose of assessment is to help students learn and to help students and teachers become accurate assessors of themselves. It shows how to apply a wide range of assessment tools to any subject matter and how to develop a personal philosophy of assessment in the process. While written tests are addressed, most of the emphasis is on performance assessment.  Assessment Techniques for Student Learning gives you an opportunity to:

 

  • Uncover unexamined assumptions (with the paradigms they inspire) and clarify personal values and goals regarding assessment.
  • Consider the relevance of brain theory in regard to meeting students’ needs in assessment.
  • Develop practical skills in designing high quality written tests and authentic assessments including observations, portfolios, artifacts, performances, learning logs, journals, self and peer assessment techniques, goal setting, plus effective ways students can assess the teacher.
  • Explore ways to increase reliability —fairness in assessment.
  • Practice the discipline involved in aligning outcomes, objectives, activities and assessment, the foundation of validity.
  • Gain skill in designing and having students help design appropriate criteria and rubrics for a variety of assessments.
  • Include varied thinking skills in assessment.
  • Emphasize student self-assessment and responsibility for learning.

Sing a Song of Science

Here’s a brain-friendly way to get children excited about science! The classroom-tested songs, raps, stories and activities are indispensable tools to help young people understand and remember scientific vocabulary and concepts. Use this 64-page activity manual and 35 minute audiotape to tap into children’s love for learning.

Brain-based teaching gets results! Get started with an easy-to-read overview of brain-friendly teaching that touches on the work of Gardner, Diamond, and Sylwester. Then use the stories, songs, musical scores, hands-on discovery activities, fun ways to reinforce the songs and stories, and websites to help children learn about:

  • Matter
  • The Layers of the Earth
  • Energy
  • Classifying
  • Observation and Inferences
  • Sound Symmetry
  • Weather
  • The Water Cycle
  • The Tropical Rain Forest
  • George Washington Carver
  • The Life Cycle of Plants
  • How Animals Move
  • How the Human Body Works
  • Respiration

Science Songs and Stories for the Big Questions

Discover the wonder and fun of science while mastering important science concepts and vocabulary! Science Songs and Stories for the Big Questions with Gwendolyn Jenifer and the Brain-Friendly Chorus is a 73 minute CD and 56 page book with sheet music for learners of all ages. Note that this CD/book has the same songs and stories as Science for Every Learner. This product is provided for people who are interested in the songs and stories, but have no need for the units of study.

Learning though songs and stories may be fundamental to human nature. For thousands of years before writing was introduced, people passed on their culture’s knowledge through songs, chants and stories.  Perhaps this is why children learn the words to the latest songs so easily.  You may have learned the alphabet through a song, yourself.

The goals of the CD/book are to use music and story to help learners to find an emotional connection to science while providing an effortless way to learn  scientific vocabulary and concepts. A number of the songs and stories can help learners get to know the steps in a sequence.

  • The “Scientific Method Blues Song” has the steps for doing an experiment.
  • The “Vibrations Rap” and “Autobiography of a Sound Wave” describe the sequence of movements of a sound from its source, through the air and each part of the ear to the brain.
  • The “Electric Connection,” shows the path electricity takes from the generator to the electrical outlet in your home.
  • The “Story of a Plant Song” and the songs and stories about the monarch butterfly describe the steps in the life cycle of a plant and insect.

Here are some ways this CD/book can be used. Learners might:

  • listen to the songs and stories while riding in the car or at home.
  • read along while listening to improve reading, scientific literacy or to learn English.
  •  act out the stories.
  • use the sheet music to sing the songs in a chorus or to play the music themselves.
  • use the CD and book at a learning center in the classroom.

A Guide to Great Field Trips

Make the world your classroom. The world is filled with educational possbilities — use it!

A Guide to Great Field Trips helps educators, group leaders, and parents make the most of these unique experiences.A Guide to Great Field Trips

This valuable resource explores every aspect of field trips, including their foundation in caring and curiosity, how leaders can establish and achieve sound learning goals, and how to avoid the headaches that too often accompany dozens of children and chaperones unleashed in a new environment.

Properly organized, a field trip can provide students with opportunities to develop lifelong learning skills, increase personal responsibility, work cooperatively with others, and expand their worldviews.

And field trips need not be full-day affairs to be valuable—even a short “trip” can provide a much richer learning experience than can be found though standard in-class instruction and serve as a welcome break from the weekday routine.

 

A Guide to Great Field Trips outlines more than 200 ideas for valuable trips within the school, around the building and playground, and through the local neighborhood. It even offers ideas for virtual field trips on the Web.

Readers can find tips on handling dozens of logistical issues related to field trips, including safety, transportation, permissions, fundraisers, grants, chaperones, meals, and more.

Kathleen Carroll has been leading students on field trips for decades. As an educational consultant she teaches about creativity and critical thinking, multiple intelligences, assessment, and science methods in a master’s degree program for Cambridge College.