Adding Experiments To Your High School Science Curriculum

For high school science teachers across America, the upcoming NGSS changes mean that we must all introduce different aspects of science into the overall understanding that our students take away from the generalized courses we once taught. For the high school science curriculum, this means introducing individual concepts such as geology and earth sciences as a part of our existing school science materials.

Here at LAB-AIDS, we know that earth sciences and geology are best taught with the hands-on approach. You can lecture on solar energy, water pollution, and ore extraction all semester long, or you can get in there and let your students experience the hands-on experiments that will really drive your point home.

To assist you in presenting these concepts to your students in a way that will stick with them, we offer multiple applied science concepts kits that you can implement in your classroom. Each of these is designed to be taught in a different number of class settings. These kits are meant to give your students a chance to do more than get their hands dirty: they make them think. Each experiment is peppered with observations that students must make in their groups or on their own. They learn about the scientific process, and the importance of recording their observations.

Beyond learning to observe and properly record their findings, your students will be forced to think with every experiment. Instead of finishing the assignment and moving on to the next, each of our applied science concept kits includes comparing results, and further applying those results to the scientific methods that are used by professionals today. Students are asked that most difficult of all questions: Explain. When asked to explain their reasoning behind the choice, students will be forced to apply their knowledge in defending their decisions.

Our school science materials include these short session kits in a variety of different geological and earth process options. Your students can learn about water cycle contaminants, how to read river sediments and what they mean for the environment, how convection currents and plate tectonics affect our world, or even about copper mining and extraction or topographic mapping. The point of each of these short high school science kits is to give your students a reason to think about the world they will be inheriting when they graduate, and how the scientific concepts that you're working so hard to teach them will play into their reality.

As the NGSS Frameworks recenter our teaching goals, you will find yourself needing to implement changes in the way that material is presented, and in the high school science curriculum itself. Let us meet these changes head-on by getting our students involved in their world today. Let us turn every opportunity that we can into a chance for our students to reason, deduce, and learn how to apply small scale experiments to the larger world around them.