8th Grade Science Guide

Constructive Conversation Resource Cards - provide sentence starters as prompts and responses for creating, fortifying, clarifying, and evaluating. A tool that can provide a familiar structure for students to engage in around classroom talk activity. Using a similar generic tool like this reduces student confusion as they become used to the tool, improves the data teachers can collect on students’ learning during instruction, and helps inform next steps of instruction. This tool is an example of what can be done to support student sensemaking, but can be easily adapted to be more specific. Response cards are an easy way for students to share a simple yes or no, true or false, abcd answer with you without speaking. A summary table is a tool used to keep evidence from activities, discussions, labs, videos, etc. which is then utilized as a scaffold for CER writing. Science vocabulary is rooted in greek and latin roots. Studying word morphology (how words are formed) by knowing some common greek/latin roots is a helpful scaffold for students Connecting Visuals to Surrounding Text. Science text is full of visuals (graphics, data tables, graphs, etc.) that are essential to the understanding of text. Connecting visuals to text is an important skill when reading science text. Helping students keep track of new vocabulary in a text is critical to their understanding. The Close Reading Routine helps teachers scaffold complex text which is often encountered in science classrooms.

Constructive Conversation Resource Cards Classroom Talk Prewrite, Notes and Post-write Graphic Organizer.

Response Cards

Summary Table Graphic Organizer - Google or Canva

Reading/ Vocab

Common Science Greek & Latin Roots

Connecting Visuals to Surrounding Text Graphic Organizer

New Vocabulary Graphic Organizer

Close Reading Routine Text Complexity Text Dependent Questions