Writing in K-1

The K-1 units provide ample opportunities to compose and record ideas through talking, drawing, and writing. Investigation Notebooks provide students with opportunities to record observations and document science ideas they are preparing to explain. As explained in the Oral Language section, talking and listening are important precursors to composing written language, so all formal writing activities in kindergarten and grade 1 units are preceded by oral language activities that often include Explanation Language Frames. In kindergarten, the class orally composes the ideas and language of the text while the teacher records the words. A similar process is used in grade 1, but students take on more responsibility for writing some of the explanations, and their writing is supported with writing planners. Every unit includes at least one mini-book about key science ideas in the unit which students complete with the teacher’s guidance. Finally, students sometimes take responsibility for oral composition and recording of ideas through illustrations or emergent and beginning writing.

Writing in grades 2-5

In grades 2-5, student writing is an essential and consistent part of every lesson, and all writing exemplifies some aspect of writing that is authentic to science. Students engage in whole-class shared writing activities as well as individual written work. Each unit’s Investigation Notebook provides the primary space for students to write and every lesson is accompanied by several notebook pages designed to support students during the lesson. Students use these notebook pages for a variety of writing activities, including making predictions, summarizing findings, reflecting on key science ideas and practices, and recording lingering questions.

In addition to the lesson-level writing activities, each grade 2-5 unit supports students in constructing and writing increasingly complex scientific explanations or arguments across the unit. Students learn how to develop grade-appropriate one-to-two paragraph written pieces that adhere to specific guidelines for scientific explanation or argumentation (e.g. A scientific explanation answers a question about how or why something happens. A scientific argument answers a claim about the natural world). Students learn to address claims with evidence and reasoning to make convincing arguments. Not only do the units support students with the content of their written explanations and arguments, but many also incorporate an emphasis on how to make an explanation or argument clear for an external audience. For example, in the Vision and Light unit, students learn about and incorporate connecting words such as first, next, and last to strengthen their writing. The grade 2-5 units thus provide students with a strong base for understanding the purpose of scientific explanation and argumentation, and offer substantial opportunities to practice writing within these genres.

Writing in grades 6-8

Students write daily in the Amplify Science middle school units. Student writing exemplifies many of the different purposes for writing in science. Students annotate articles, evidence cards, and diagrams; write short answers to questions; write to explain their own diagrams and models; and engage in longer writing activities to support a claim.,

Students annotate often, whether it is for articles they read or textual evidence sources they examine. Annotation is an extremely useful skill for all disciplines, but it has a very important role in the science classroom (and for scientists). Science texts and data are often complex and research shows that annotation is an important way for a reader to stop and think carefully about what they are reading. As addressed in the discussion of Active Reading above, annotations also provide a record of students’ thinking, so that they can revisit a text and use their annotations to recapture their thinking. Additionally in science, visual representations are crucial for understanding and communicating about science ideas. Amplify Science units encourage students to annotate visual representations to help them understand what each is communicating.

Annotating is only one of many examples of informal ways that writing is authentically and purposefully added to every unit. For instance, students begin each day with a Warm-Up, which; almost always ask students to write their thinking about an important content idea for that lesson. Students write responses and summarizing texts at the conclusion of many activities as well.

The most conspicuous kind of writing that students participate in for the Amplify Science middle school units, however, is the writing of scientific arguments or explanations. Students use content from the unit, as well as specific data sources, to write complete arguments several times in each unit. Specifically, students always write an argument or explanation about the content and unit context they have been considering when they reach the end of Chapter 3, then write a longer, complete scientific argument at the end of Chapter 4. Often, they are provided with more opportunities than this, as well.

Students’ argumentation writing is scaffolded in many significant ways. For example, for units where Reasoning is a focus, the Reasoning Tool was conceived of as a scaffold for supporting students in thinking about and identifying the reasoning that would be needed to make a convincing argument. In these Reasoning-focused units, students examine the evidence they are provided for their argument, then use the Reasoning Tool to express and extract the reasoning that would support their argument, before beginning to write. In addition to the support offered with the Reasoning Tool, students are supplied with resources like sentence starters and word banks that they can use when writing.