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Teaching science in elementary school is crucial for nurturing young minds, but as educators, finding the time and resources to create engaging lessons can be a challenge. That's where this podcast comes in. Welcome to Naturally Teaching Elementary Science, the show dedicated to supporting elementary teachers in their quest to bring authentic and place-based science experiences to their classroom.

I'm Victoria Zablocki, a certified elementary teacher turned outdoor educator. With over a decade of experience coaching teachers on effective science teaching methods, I'm passionate about making science accessible, understandable, and fun for educators and students alike. Join me as we explore strategies for teaching science in elementary school with practical teaching tips, insightful interviews, and more.

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Welcome back to the Naturally Teaching Elementary Science Podcast. My name is Victoria Zablocki, and I'm your host, and I'm super excited to talk to you today about teaching with phenology. So, the idea for this episode came from an interview I did recently with Victoria Hackett on her podcast, the Outdoor Classrooms podcast.

And if you're interested in nature based learning, if you haven't listened to her podcast yet, I suggest going to check it out. There's a lot of wonderful information on there, she's a wealth of knowledge and she also brings on amazing guests. We had a wonderful conversation about using nature to fulfill elementary science standards and curriculum. We talked about scope and sequence and maybe some things that could hold teachers back and ways to be able to combat that. But as we talked, I realized there was a lot more to unpack about organizing science curriculum. and also developing lessons for your science standards. So I wanted to talk about organizing your science curriculum today with a phenology lens.

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So phenology is the study of what's happening in nature over the course of the year. It's cyclical and it repeats and it shows patterns. And it's very beneficial for your students. So by organizing science standards with phenology in mind, your students will easily engage with all of their senses, which creates more memories.

And it also allows for better recall because of those memories. It also lends itself well to a variety of different science activities. So you'll be hitting on different science skills and using different science tools in a way to be able to reach all of your different learners. It also provides authentic phenomenon to study to fulfill your science standards, which is often hard to come by.

A lot of times we work really hard to find something to get our students interested, But honestly, what's happening outside is a huge magnet for students. It also gives students a developing understanding of content. Because phenology is cyclical, your students will touch on the same subject throughout the school year, which helps them see the overall picture of the curriculum, and it also gives them an opportunity to revisit some things they learned from the beginning of the year towards the end of the year, which helps with that overall understanding.

I do want to note, though, that this is not just for grades that study weather and climates. That sounds like it would be the most obvious use for this case, but truthfully, whether you're teaching weather or animals or magnets, organizing your science curriculum with phenology is beneficial to your students because it gives real time observational opportunities and it's also place-based, which has been proven to be beneficial for students and their overall understanding of curriculum.

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So I'm going to jump right into it. Creating a scope and sequence may not be the easiest thing, especially if you're a beginner to what's happening outside. If you don't have any background knowledge about what's happening during the seasons, then it'd be really hard to be able to create a scope and sequence with phenology in mind.

So, if you are one of these novices, no worries, I've got ideas for you. What I suggest is to take this year to make notes for yourself, Or, you could reach out to a local nature center or a state or national park to find out what's happening. You can talk to a naturalist or somebody who's more in tune with the phenology of your local community.

If you choose to take on note taking yourself, what I suggest is to print out monthly calendar views and mark things you know are happening in nature, such as the autumnal equinox, which usually happens around September 20th or the 21st of each year; the winter solstice, which usually happens around December 20th or 21st of each year; and the vernal equinox, which usually happens around March 20th or the 21st of each year.

Then I suggest you make it a practice to take notes on those calendars once a week about what you're noticing outside. Do you see migrating birds? Do you see flowers blooming? Has it been really rainy this week? Have you seen reptiles and amphibians out sunning? anything else that you can make note of.

That way, at the end of this school year, you'll have an idea of the ebb and flow of what's happening in your local space. Then, once you have more familiarity about what happens throughout the year, you now can take that information and plan your curriculum around phenology. So it may take an entire school year to get the notes that you need, but once you have that information, you'll be empowered to be able to organize your curriculum with phenology in mind.

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So, to do that, I've created scope and sequences with teachers using three main steps. So first, I suggest you take a look at your science standards and find themes. So the scope and sequences that I have helped develop use the Next Generation Science Standards. And I want to use first grade as an example because if you go back and listen to that episode that I talked about with Victoria Hackett on the Outdoor Classrooms podcast, I used kindergarten as an example; so by using first grade I can give you a second example to be able to talk about creating a scope and sequence.

So with first grade, if you take a look at their standards - physical science is pretty much about waves, both sound and light waves. And then life science can be broken down into the heredity of animals and plants, and then also a small chunk which is biomimicry. And then the earth and space science is about patterns in the sky, so the sun, moon, stars, and the amount of sunlight.

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The second step is to try to match those themes to what's happening in nature in your community. To be completely honest, this is a more difficult way of organizing your curriculum because you're jumping around your standards instead of completing one unit and then moving on to the next unit. However, the learning experiences that your students are going to have are going to be more natural, and they're going to have context, which makes it easier for your students to learn, and it's more reflective of the real world. We don't just stick with one unit and then move on to the next when you're learning your job, or when you're out in public. Things are intermixed, and this will give a more authentic experience to your students, and they'll learn better.

So if we take a look at our first grade example, and we're trying to match themes to what's happening in nature, what we're going to do is look for things that can be enhanced when taught during certain times of the year. So, with plant heredity, I'm in the Midwest, I'm in Michigan, so we only have leaves and flowers on our plants during September, October, April, and May. So it would be beneficial for me to work with students on plant heredity during these months.

And to be honest, this standard for plants would be great to visit twice in a school year, once in the fall before the plants get ready for winter, and again in the spring after they've begun their growing season again. Similar to plants, we only have access to insects, reptiles, and amphibians during September, October, April, and May.

So it would make sense to study insect heredity during one of these times. If we think back to those themes that I talked about with first grade, heredity of animals and plants would be best served if we talked about different groups of animals and their heredity throughout the school year. So I want to make sure that I talk about insect heredity during a time when we could actually find insects.

The physical science for first grade includes sound waves, and students could really benefit from observing and studying animals that use sound to communicate. So here in Michigan, we have vernal pools with frogs in April. So if I were to schedule sound waves, a couple of weeks of sound waves, in March, then we'd be able to apply that information to the frogs that are calling in April when we do an amphibian study.

And because reptiles are often confused with amphibians, and they're only available in September, October, April, and May, it would make sense to schedule our reptile study after our amphibian study.

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The third step would be to take a look for topics that could be taught inside and outside in the winter. And this tends to be the physical science topics because they're a little more versatile. But versatility is important because your school may have an outside temperature where they keep students inside. So you need to be flexible with the topics you teach in winter in case you need to stay inside due to extreme temperatures.

A lot of this phenology-based learning benefits from going outside at least a few times. However, if you don't go outside, that's no big deal. So if we think about the first grade example again, we talked about light waves and sky patterns as being some of the themes that are in first grade curriculum.

Both of these could be taught in the winter time. And honestly, I would prioritize sky patterns to happen around the winter solstice, since this is when we experience the most hours of night. And then your students can more easily observe the moon and the stars in the dark before they usually go to bed around like 8 or 9.

Some other topics that work well in the winter include magnets, states of matter, water cycle, pushes and pulls, severe weather, biomimicry… lots of physical science topics fall into this category.

Something that I do want to point out that's unique to first grade is making observations at different times of the year to relate the amount of daylight to that time of the year. That's one of the sky pattern standards. So, with this standard, I would intentionally take a certain day of the week or every other week to observe and record data about the number of hours of daylight. This gives you a large dataset that you can graph with your students, and then your students can see how the hours of daylight ebb and flow and how that could affect the plants and animals and how they react to the different seasons. And if you only studied this for a week throughout the year, then your students would miss out on the overall picture and miss the scientific skills of data collection, analysis, and graphing.

Similarly, in kindergarten and third grade, in the Next Generation Science Standards, they study weather. So they can benefit from seasonal studies, but they also benefit from a weather data collection day or every other week where they collect data throughout the whole year. And then if you summarize what happened at the end of the year. They can see that ebb and flow again of weather and how that's related to the seasonal changes.

Alright, so that was a lot of information. So the three steps to create a scope and sequence that we talked about were to look at your science standards and find themes, then try to match those themes to what's happening in nature in your community, and then take a look for topics that could be taught inside and outside in the winter.

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So if we take all that phenology organization, we could tentatively end up with a schedule that looks like

• September - outdoor education routines and expectations, including plants.
• October - we study insects
• November - we could use birds or mammals because both are available throughout the school year
• December - we would study light waves
• January - we could study sky patterns
• February - we could spend the first half talking about biomimicry and then the second half, we could either do birds or mammals, whichever you didn't do in November
• March - your first half could be the birds or the mammals and the second half could be sound waves as an introduction
• April - we would talk about amphibians
• May - we would talk about reptiles, and whatever leftover time you have, you could hit on plants again.

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So, after creating that scope and sequence, I would take a closer look at my standards. And I would notice that the animal units could actually be broken down into three different weeks that could be repeated with each animal group throughout the whole school year.

And then that would give your students a variety of opportunities to practice applying these new skills and material. So I would start with week one, where we would introduce each animal group, describing characteristics that make that group unique. And it gives your students context for the rest of the material you're going to cover.

And if you're not super familiar with animal characteristics, check out episode 7 of this podcast called “Animal Characteristic Breakdown: Reaching Your Curricular Goals by Teaching with Animals”, where I cover the different unique characteristics of vertebrate groups and insects. By introducing the characteristics that make them unique, it makes the second week a little bit easier to understand.

In the Next Generation Science Standards, there's the standard 1-LS3-1, which is: make observations to construct an evidence based account that young plants and animals are like but not exactly like their parents. So, if you've already talked about the characteristics that make animals unique, you could go on to talk about how those animals are like but not exactly like their parents.

This would look like exploring the characteristics that you broke down the week before, like covering, coloration, external body parts, etc. Your third week could then work towards the standard 1-LS1-2 which is: read texts and use media to determine patterns in behavior or parents of offspring that help offspring survive.

The previous standard was looking at how those animals and plants look like their parents. This one goes into more about how animals behave like their parents. So one of the best ways to discover patterns of behavior is to look at how animals survive in winter. This can be done in the fall and the winter and the spring.

So if you talk about it in the fall, you talk about how they get ready for winter. If you're talking about it in the winter, you talk about how they're actually doing it right now. And then if you talk about it in the spring, you talk about what they did prior to now and how they've come out of that. This will show the students how an animal can act like their parent in order to survive a season of scarcity.

So to sum it up, each animal group would follow this pattern.

• Week one: would be unique animal characteristics
• Week two: would be how animals look like their parents.
• Week three: would be how animals act like their parents

And again, this way of organizing the curriculum will give your students predictability and repetition to help them have a more developed understanding of the information.

And also because it's organized with phenology at its core, your students will get to see the material in real time happening outside, which is very powerful and creates a great natural phenomenon for them to study.

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Okay. So now that we've covered scope and sequence. Now we're going to talk briefly about lesson planning. So personally, I've used the workshop model where I plan an all class meeting or a mini lesson to teach a small skill or concept, and if you have a 30 minute science block, that usually lasts about 5 minutes. Then I give the students time to practice the new information or skill for about 20 minutes, and then I've wrapped up with a conclusion for about 5 minutes.

If you have more than 30 minutes, I've found the sweet spot to be about one sixth of the time for the intro, two thirds of the time for the practice, and then one sixth of the time for the conclusion. So as you consider writing lessons, think about ways that you can break down those themes into small digestible chunks, and then use those for your hooks or your mini lessons to start off each day.

That way you can build your students’ knowledge over time, and it gives them time to practice each building block on your way through the curriculum. Using the first grade example again, say you're beginning your sound waves unit. You could plan to break the concept down into the following mini topics for the first week.

• Day one could be a hearing sound sensory discovery where you go and you try to find different sounds.
• Day two could be a sensory discovery of vibrations, so finding things that vibrate.
• Day three could be how we hear sounds using vibrations.
• Day four could be about waves and how sound waves travel.
• And day five could be about waves and what sound waves might look like.

So if we want to take a look at day one and creating a lesson for that concept, I would create a mini lesson where I introduce hearing with 30 seconds of quiet, talk about what we heard, talk about what part of the body we use to hear, and if you want to, you could also dive into how somebody who has hearing impairments might be able to feel sounds since they can't use their ears the same way that we do.

And as a side note, if you're starting this unit in the winter, There's a great book called Ten Ways to Hear Snow by Kathy Camper and that would make a great mini lesson on day one.

Then you give them the opportunity to practice, so you're going to let them find sounds and make sounds either outside or inside with materials that they find. Then you're going to do the conclusion, the wrap up, by talking about what they noticed about the sounds that they were finding or making. Did they notice a difference in volume? Did they notice a difference in pitch? And then make sure that they share with a friend, you know that students always like to share.

By using the workshop model to be able to organize your lessons, you're providing your students bite-sized pieces of knowledge and then giving them opportunities to practice, which is a really powerful way to teach any science concept. So whether you're doing it inside or outside, this is the way that I found most successful to be able to have building blocks and long term recall.

And as a side note, if you're a teacher teaching sound waves, tuning forks are a great visual to show how vibrations make sounds. So if you have them in a science kit from 10 years ago, make sure you pull those bad boys out because they are a great visual for teaching sound waves, just as a side note.

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So that was a lot of information.  So I want to summarize it real quick, so that way you have all this information. And don't forget in the show notes, I make sure to write all these notes up and there'll be a transcript. So that way, if you need to go back and see it in a visual way, go for it. It's on my website at naturallyteaching.com/episode 11.

So in a nutshell, we talked about creating a scope and sequence by using three steps. First, looking at your science standards and finding themes. Second, matching those themes to what's happening in nature in your community. And third, taking a look for topics that could be taught inside and outside in the winter.

Then we talked about lesson planning using the workshop model, where you provide a mini lesson, then you provide practice, and then you provide a wrap up or a conclusion.

So thanks for taking the time to listen today. I know you're super busy and I truly appreciate the time you take to tune in. If you have any questions, wonderings, or ways that you create lessons that you want feedback on, get ahold of me on Instagram at naturally.teaching, or you can email me at victoria@naturallyteaching.com. If you're enjoying this podcast, it'd be great if you left a review for other educators. Your kind words could be the difference between them choosing to listen or not. And we want to get the word out there on how to be able to implement some of these unique and powerful ways of teaching elementary science. So thanks again for joining me today, and until next time, keep exploring, keep learning, and keep naturally teaching.

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Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode of the Naturally Teaching Elementary Science Podcast. I hope you found it informative, inspiring, and full of actionable insights to enhance your science teaching journey. Connect with me on social media for more updates, science tidbits, and additional resources.

You can find me on Instagram and Facebook at naturally.teaching. Let's continue the conversation and share our passion for elementary science education together. Don't forget to visit my website at naturallyteaching.com for all the show notes from today's episode. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform.

Your feedback helps me improve and reach more educators just like you. Thank you again for listening, and until next time, keep exploring, keep learning, and keep naturally teaching.