North Hills School Board Expects to Adopt New Science Curriculum

Approval of an updated science curriculum for grades K-6 in the  will be among the items on Monday night's agenda for the district's school board. 

The board meets at 7:30 p.m. in the LGI room of the North Hills Junior High School. 

The update is in keeping with the district's practice of rewriting curriculum for various subjects every six years. The last science curriculum update occurred in 2005. 

The new curriculum proposes using the FOSS Science Program, a national standard for teaching science, and involves the use of teaching kits provided by ASSET Inc., a local education company.

The kits allow teachers to engage their students with interactive experiments and investigations, said Jeffrey Taylor, director of curriculum and assessment.

“This curriculum is very rigorous, but it’s also very engaging,” Taylor said. “Students are going to be able to participate in a lot of hands-on, minds-on activities that will develop their critical thinking skills as well as their pundit knowledge in science.”

He said the curriculum is not set in stone for the next six years but will evolve. 

“In that six-year curriculum cycle we are always modifying and adapting as we see fit,” Taylor said. “So if in three years we need to tweak something, we can do that.”

The curriculum was planned and organized by a team of educators, including curriculum leader Lisa Goodworth, all of the elementary school principals and teachers who volunteered. They worked together for two summers to create a curriculum that meets both state and national standards for elementary science.

“The biggest changes in the curriculum are related to Big Ideas, Essential Questions, and 21^st Century Skills,” said Goodworth, who is also a second-grade teacher at West View Elementary.

The "Big Ideas" of the curriculum are structured modules that give teachers a focused topic. Each grade must cover between three and four Big Ideas in a year. Topics are simple ideas such as trees and animals in kindergarten, but then become more complicated in the form of diversity of life and measurement in sixth grade.

Each module fits into the life science, earth science or physical science category, which is meant to prepare students for more difficult science classes in the future. In addition, a different module on ecology or the environment is taught in every grade.

Within these modules, said Goodworth, the "Essential Questions" give teachers a specific look into students’ thought processes and help them know what the students will ask. The 21^st Century skills, however, help students to look to the future.

“They teach students ways of thinking that will allow them to grow and develop in a society where technology is constantly changing,” said Goodworth.