Amplify Science 6–8 has new resources and updated content for the 2023–2024 school year. The updated content reflects newer data to support the rigorous and riveting learning experiences your students deserve. The new resources, meanwhile, provide teachers support for understanding where each NGSS Performance Expectation is assessed, and for eliciting and leveraging students’ prior experiences.

Every unit now includes a PDF called 3-D Assessment Objectives. Located in the Printable Resources area of the Unit Overview, this document includes the focal Performance Expectations for the unit and identifies the locations of summative and formative assessments that reveal student knowledge and use of the three dimensions to support progress toward those Performance Expectations.

All Amplify Science units include optional opportunities to elicit and build upon students’ personal experiences and family and community funds of knowledge. A new document now provides additional strategies and tools that can be optionally utilized to augment these opportunities. Titled “Eliciting and Leveraging Students’ Prior Knowledge, Personal Experiences, and Cultural Backgrounds,” the document is located in the Printable Resources area of the Unit Overview.

Two of the resources described in the Eliciting and Leveraging Students’ Prior Knowledge, Personal Experiences, and Cultural Backgrounds PDF are the Family and Community Connections Homework and the Family and Community Expertise Scavenger Hunt. See below for more information about each of these.

The Family and Community Expertise Scavenger Hunt is a new, optional activity that was added to each launch unit (Microbiome, Geology on Mars, and Harnessing Human Energy). In the Scavenger Hunt activity (if assigned), students identify members of their family or community with expertise in several practices important to science and engineering. Identifying these funds of knowledge will help students access these resources in their community during their year of science class, and help students make connections between science class and their home and community.

The Family and Community Expertise Scavenger Hunt can be downloaded from the Digital Resources area of the following lessons: Lesson 2.1 of Microbiome, Lesson 1.2 of Geology on Mars, and Lesson 1.4 of Harnessing Human Energy.

Every unit now includes one Family and Community Connections Homework activity that can be optionally assigned to students for additional engagement. Assigning the Family and Community Connections Homework at the start of a unit may help prepare your students to reflect on and share their own personal experiences and relevant ideas, expertise, and experiences from their family and community.

Each unit’s Family and Community Connections Homework PDF can be downloaded from the Digital Resources area of Lesson 1.1 in Launch units (see above), Day 1 in Engineering Internship units, and Lesson 1.2 in all other units.

Some of the articles, projections, and print materials of some units have been updated with more recent data! From graphs that now go through 2020 to NASA plans for a future Mars sample return mission, these updates ensure that your students are engaging with the most recent information possible.

The resources available digitally within the Amplify Science curriculum are always the most up-to-date as compared to the print versions. Our next print run will reflect these content updates, but in the meantime, if you have print items that you are concerned about being outdated or different from what you see in the digital curriculum, please refer to the table below. Outlined there are the units that contain content updates, a description of the updates, and what materials you may want to re-print depending on your plans for using print vs. digital materials with your students. Please note, however, that using print materials with the original content in them will not impede your students’ ability to access the learning goals of the unit.