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  • Learning with Chain Reactions

Chain Reaction STEM Activities with Simple Machines

November 10, 2025|

In this article you’ll get an overview of classroom chain reactions from basic definitions to easy launch ideas. You’ll find suggestions for selecting materials, planning your space, and setting goals that feel achievable for your classroom size and schedule. We will show how these activities build confidence with innovation and give students regular practice with creativity, logic, and teamwork that carries into other subjects and their overall creativity.

  • Scientific Investigation Framework

The Scientific Investigation Framework: Re-Designing Labs in the Science Classroom

June 16, 2023|

Science is different in other content areas in that the foundation of its existence relies on asking questions about the world around us, forming and testing a hypothesis, and analyzing the results. It’s only natural that a science classroom would mirror the essence of this field. While direct instruction and practice-based learning have their place, the science classroom is where learning to discover is as important as the content itself. In this blog post, we’ll outline a specific process, the Scientific Investigation Framework, that will provide structure to discovery-based Lab work that will transform how students are introduced to new content and practice the necessary processes of a true scientist.

  • Student Response System

The Student Response System as an Effective Verbal Strategy to Check for Student Understanding

April 12, 2022|

A simple verbal strategy to check for student understanding throughout your lesson is the Student Response System and is the focus of this article. This strategy presents questioning prompts in multiple-choice or true-false format for students to answer in real-time. Students will respond to the prompts using pre-made cards with A, B, C, D, True, False, or other information to indicate their selection of an answer choice displayed on the board. The student response system can be prepared easily by cutting out printed cards, laminating them, and making them available to each student in your classroom. If you have it available at your school, there are also electronic versions of this student response system, commonly known as Clickers. Physical devices may be available for use at your school, or you may have an app or website that you can access to employ an online student response system.

  • CER-in-Science-min

Claim-Evidence-Reasoning (CER)

January 29, 2019|

Have you ever had students respond, “I don’t know. It just did,” when asked to analyze and interpret their classroom lab results? We all want our students to “think like a scientist,” but often they fall short in connecting the dots between the lab results and the science concepts. Claim-Evidence-Reasoning or CER is a writing strategy that can develop a student’s analytical thinking and argumentative writing skills to turn that “I don’t know” into “aha, so that’s why we got those results in the lab.”

  • Project Based Learning

A Glimpse at Project Based Learning in the Classroom

December 13, 2018|

As an educator, you have probably heard of Project Based Learning, or PBL, but might have been overwhelmed by all it seems to encompass. Take a close glimpse of an actual PBL project in action in the classroom to see that it is completely manageable!  After reading this article, you will have a basic understanding of Project Based Learning and what it looks like in the classroom.

  • Math & Science Lesson

Analyzing The Rigor of Your Math or Science Lesson

July 6, 2017|

This summer, take a look back at the way you structured your lesson content and analyzed word problems in math and science.  We’ll review a few areas you should consider when selecting problems for your students and determining how to deliver the lesson content in an appropriate way, aligned to the required depth for the standards.   This content corresponds to page one of our math & Science Lesson Analyzer and Lesson Plan.  Continue reading to download the Lesson Analyzer & Lesson Plan.

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