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.
Oral and written language in K-1
Young children are simultaneously developing language and learning through language. Oral language development is therefore an important consideration when planning learning experiences about aspects of the world that young children are just encountering. The Amplify Science approach to oral language is connected to writing, and considers the trajectory of students’ expressive language and vocabulary development.
The oral language built across the kindergarten and grade 1 units helps students develop language that facilitates their learning of challenging concepts and supports them in explaining their learning to others (both orally and through writing). Over the course of the kindergarten and grade 1 units, students participate in class discussions and are supported in learning how to converse with each other, to agree or disagree, and to build on their peers’ science ideas. This oral language build links explanation language common in science to authentic learning contexts, and it builds children’s facility with causal language across the units of study. Following the Gradual Release of Responsibility Model, the Explanation Language Frame expands in complexity throughout a unit, scaffolding students’ acquisition of scientific ways of speaking and thinking.
Amplify Science units provide ample opportunities to compose and record ideas through talking, drawing, and writing text. At times the focus remains solely on talking and listening, with the teacher and students orally composing sentences and ideas. At other times the teacher takes the lead on both oral composition and the recording of written text. Still other times, the students help orally compose the ideas and language of the text while the teacher records the words. Finally, students sometimes take responsibility for oral composition and recording of ideas through illustrations or emergent and beginning writing.
Listening and speaking in grades 2–5
In grades 2–5, the Amplify Science units 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 band, 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. For example, the Inheritance and Traits unit features the Thought Swap routine. This routine invites each student in a pair to explain themselves clearly to a partner, to carefully listen to the ideas shared by the partner, and to share their own or their partner’s ideas with the class. Students then rotate partners and repeat the process with a new partner and prompt. This and other discourse routines employed in the grades 2–5 units support all students with expressing their thinking, as well as learning to listen carefully and respectfully to their peers.