Listening and speaking
Listening and speaking are essential to participating in science activities and communities. Amplify Science thus provides many authentic opportunities for talking and listening as students refine their thinking and communicate their ideas to various audiences. Throughout the Amplify Science curriculum, students use discussion to construct explanations and join in oral argumentation. For example, students discuss evidence in order to understand it and to work together to determine what claim the evidence supports. As students discuss, they are practicing vital aspects of constructing explanations and argumentation, such as deeply understanding evidence, working with others to understand the meaning of evidence, convincing others, and providing logical reasoning. Oral language and discussion is further supported across the grades through discourse routines such as Shared Listening, Think-Pair-Share, and Word Relationships, and through organized discussions such as Evidence Circles. See below for more details.
Listening and speaking in grades 2-5
Amplify Science units in grades 2-5 provide numerous opportunities for students to engage in both formal and informal discussion. These discussion opportunities surface in each lesson as students listen and share ideas in partner, small-group, and whole-class configurations. At this grade level, many activities are completed in pairs or groups of four. Structured prompts are provided for students to discuss their thinking with partners at various stages of the activities. Partner reading of each student book in the unit provides a particularly rich opportunity for students to exchange ideas about the key science and engineering content and practices they encounter. Following the partner and small-group work, students come back together as a class to discuss their developing understanding.
In addition to the discussion opportunities embedded throughout the hands-on and reading activities, discourse routines provide students with structured opportunities to develop their oral language skills in conjunction with their growing science understanding. Each grade 5 unit includes a focal discourse routine that is used multiple times throughout the unit. For example, unit The Earth System unit features the Word Relationships routine. This routine supports students in thinking deeply about science concepts through interacting with words they’ve been learning. In this routine, partners work with key science words (which are printed on cards) to make sentences. Groups discuss what they’ve learned and then share their ideas with the class. The Word Relationships routine therefore allows students to communicate what they know about science words in their own way, and to receive feedback from the teacher and their peers. This and other discourse routines employed in throughout grade 5 units support all students with expressing their thinking, as well as learning to listen carefully and respectfully to their peers.