Hi Everyone,
I would love to hear from people how science education fits into your experiences teaching adults. For me, it has been mostly teaching health literacy. The science parts of that include basic anatomy, how the body works in terms of diesease processes and medicine use, nutrition and its effect on the body, and things like that.
How else do you integrate science into ABE and ESOL?
And then what kinds of resources would help in the kind of science teaching you do?
I would really love to hear your thoughts!!
Thanks,
Julie
Comments
I like this question. I like to teach students how to read and think about science in everyday areas. Here are two ways I do that.
We take an assumption and put it to test. For examlple, they surveyed the class about water drinking habits (bottle or tap), but then they conducted a taste test of bottle vs. tap water and found that they may have no clear preference. They learned the scientific method, created tables and graphs, and wrote about results.
I believe in addition to health science, students should be able to understand the latest scientific news, be it Mars exploration or advances in understanding how the brain works. Discover magazine or Popular Science are great current resources. Preteaching vocabulary may be necessary.
Mollie, your "water drinking habits" lesson is a great example of integrating science into ABE classes by using everyday topics! We all operate with a lot of assumptions in mind, so any group would find a relevant assumption to test. Thanks for the reading resources, as well. How often do you spend class time on activities like these?
Thanks, Mollie, I like that idea, too! I agree that two values of science in our lives are how to question and test assumptions and how to understand the interesting and possibly life-changing scientific news that we see.
It would be great to hear more ideas from others about activities like yours that they do in class.
And what resources would help in doing these kinds of things?