Mission: To Understand and Appreciate Nature

Highlight your state of mind while learning. Aim for relaxed, creative, flexible, curious, receptive. To this end, singing scientific leads you to work creatively with scientific models.

Draw, color, label, question, research and discuss model illustrations. Design and create your own. Sing along with the call-and-response song. Like the visual, the song follows the scientific process. Rhythm and rhyme define key terms. Write and rap or sing your own. Story leads you to imagine traveling through the scientific model. Finish the story or follow the story prompts to write your own. Poetry helps you to reflect on the meaning of and connections to the science. Movement, as with all singing scientific pieces, leads you to relax and physically experience through creative imagination. 

Pieces fit together to illuminate the whole. In this way we learn to understand and appreciate nature. 

Illustrated text, worksheets, and chapter introductions are included.

Description of Pieces

    Each media piece provides a different perspective on the topic, allowing for a different set of observations, questions, and problems. Together, the materials lead to a deeper relationship with the science.
    The illustration, a scientific model to observe and question, gives visual clues to the key terms and main steps of the scientific process. The image supports writing, as label turns from bullet point to phrase to sentence to paragraph to essay. Like a sponge, the illustration can zoom in and out, starting small and soaking up detail and detail as the unit progresses.
    The song accesses a different part of the brain by outlining the process with rhythm and rhyme. The rhyming, repeating hook features definitions of the key terms. Call and response elicits retention, deep memory, and joy. Often students jump up and dance. Students I haven’t seen for many years yell out snippets from science songs: “the atoms break free!”
    The story follows the process in more detail, as a narrative, up close and personal. As in a fable, non-human entities, alive or not, are imbued with human attributes. Participants discover unexpected emotion and drama in science, building connection and relevance.
    Poetry allows us to step away, searching for relevance. In this Singing Scientific context, the poet asks so what?, why should i care? The science poetry searches for further connections-personal, social, or political. Basically, the poetry looks for the big picture.

     After these different creative interpretations of the science, the illustrated text video present the information in a creative, straight forward manner. This is where the rubber hits the road, with background music by the author.

The introduction gives ideas on how you might approach this flexible enrichment curriculum.