Chester Elementary Teachers Preparation for Outdoor Core/NGSS Rollout
Over the last three years, Chester teachers, Kellie Bainbridge, Janae LaGroue, Aletha O’Kelley, Meghan Whalen, Brooke Geer, Nicholle Crowther, Susan Tantardino, and Camille Klimek, have taken on a huge responsibility in our district, by agreeing to pilot Next Generation Science Standards ( NGSS).They have been the pioneers willing to dissect and deconstruct NGSS to create a curriculum guide and instructional plans that would be specifically suited to Plumas County.
In 2013, the California Department of Education adopted new science standards to update and improve the framework for educating generations of science-literate students. However, the NGSS framework and core ideas were created with the flexibility for local educators to adopt a unique strategy to best fit their school’s needs and strengths. Plumas Unified’s NGSS strategy is Outdoor Core, which builds upon Plumas Unified’s thirty-year history of formal outdoor education. This history includes well established outdoor learning environments …show more content…
This preparation culminated over this past June and July, where teachers dedicated 300 plus hours to create their own Outdoor Core units, for their different grade levels, complete with monthly plans, instructional activities, resources, links, field trips, service learning projects, and alignment documents. To do this they utilized lessons from Project Wet, Project Wild, Adopt a Watershed to create lessons and put them into the NGSS model. They had to go through hundreds of Curriculum guides – put out by various publishers related to hands-on science – and pull from these different resources to decide on the best lessons. This meant reading through each lesson, chapter by chapter, book by book to decide what was best, based on NGSS standards and grade-level
Over the last three years, Chester teachers, Kellie Bainbridge, Janae LaGroue, Aletha O’Kelley, Meghan Whalen, Brooke Geer, Nicholle Crowther, Susan Tantardino, and Camille Klimek, have taken on a huge responsibility in our district, by agreeing to pilot Next Generation Science Standards ( NGSS).They have been the pioneers willing to dissect and deconstruct NGSS to create a curriculum guide and instructional plans that would be specifically suited to Plumas County.
In 2013, the California Department of Education adopted new science standards to update and improve the framework for educating generations of science-literate students. However, the NGSS framework and core ideas were created with the flexibility for local educators to adopt a unique strategy to best fit their school’s needs and strengths. Plumas Unified’s NGSS strategy is Outdoor Core, which builds upon Plumas Unified’s thirty-year history of formal outdoor education. This history includes well established outdoor learning environments …show more content…
This preparation culminated over this past June and July, where teachers dedicated 300 plus hours to create their own Outdoor Core units, for their different grade levels, complete with monthly plans, instructional activities, resources, links, field trips, service learning projects, and alignment documents. To do this they utilized lessons from Project Wet, Project Wild, Adopt a Watershed to create lessons and put them into the NGSS model. They had to go through hundreds of Curriculum guides – put out by various publishers related to hands-on science – and pull from these different resources to decide on the best lessons. This meant reading through each lesson, chapter by chapter, book by book to decide what was best, based on NGSS standards and grade-level