Inside-Out: Environmental Science in the Classroom & the Field - Grades 3-8

For teachers seeking new ways to integrate Earth Science, chemistry, physical geography, and life science into a study of the environment, here is a guide that can help you refresh your content knowledge and plan meaningful classroom and outdoor learning experiences with your students.

Inside-Out: Environmental Science in the Classroom and the Field, Grades 3-8 provides thought-provoking, interesting activities to help teachers and students investigate and better understand the world around them.

Inside-Out covers topics such as using topographic maps to better understand landforms, exploring the physical landscape of a local area, learning how water sustains biological organisms, and discovering the relationship between soil conditions and local flora - employing both field- and classroom-based lessons to convey important environmental science concepts. Each chapter includes a content primer on the material covered, followed by activities that allow students to use direct observation and inquiry to learn various concepts in environmental science. The authors also provide many web resources that will point teachers in the right direction for gaining even more information about these subjects.

If you're looking for ways to bring environmental science lessons to life for your students, Inside-Out can help you do it!

Early chapters – research design, background research, hypothesis writing and proposal writing – help students conceive and implement their projects. Later chapters on descriptive and inferential statistics, as well as graphical representations, help them correctly interpret their data. Final chapters enable students to effectively communicate their results by writing and documenting a STEM research essay, as well as by preparing for oral and poster presentations. Included are student handouts, checklists, presentation observation sheets and sample assessment rubrics.