Meredith Scheiner & Varty Yeremian

Resource The Franklin Institute Website http://www.fi.edu/msp/r estless_earth/kids.html Brain Pop Medium Website Rationale

Annotated Resource List

Topic: Data Interpretation and Graphing

Limitations/Comments

Grade: 8th

This is a great resource that offers many links to websites that provide visual enhancements for topics such as natural disasters. For example it provides useful earthquake summary posters that include graphs and maps which can be used for teaching. This web source offers instructional materials for K-8 teachers. From videos, lesson ideas, activities, and quizzes, this site can help bring technology into an 8th grade classroom. They have videos for our topic on graphs and on the science topics covered. Our students are incredibly familiar with this website and the format of the videos. This gives the students a more structured way to classify minerals than their textbook does. While their textbook address everything the Dana System does, it doesnt explain that there are families of minerals.

This is great for presenting students with ready made graphs that can be used for class discussion about scientific data interpretation. This is a resource that the science teacher already uses, and I think it provides more than what it gets used for in the classroom. It would be good to use it to its full potential. This website is the the most accessible one we could find for 8th graders on the Dana System for classifying minerals. The information on the website is accurate, it just doesnt look as reputable as many of the other websites with the similar information. The information available on this site may be overwhelming to teachers at first, but for our teaching purposes it does provide some useful information. This book will help us stay on track with the science curriculum that they follow at our school. It offers great formative assessment tools to gauge student understanding throughout a lesson. While the activities and lessons are ready made, they arent tied to the science lesson we are using. We would need to edit the activities to match the science topics we are integrating.

Website

http://www.rocksandmi nerals4u.com/mineral_ classification.html

Website

National Geographic education.nationalgeog raphic.com Inside the Restless Earth Holt Science & Technology (2005) nsta.org

Website

This website can help find some of the scientific content that we want to use to teach data interpretation and graphing. Videos and activities are available for 8th grade that target topics such as volcanoes, plate tectonics, and earthquakes. The book offers the basic scientific content information that we plan to integrate with our math lesson. Important keyword vocabulary and scientific concepts can be used from this book to formulate the math problems we want to use for our lessons. This site offers great articles that help integrate the study of earth science with math in middle school classrooms. It can be a valuable resource when planning our curriculum. http://learningcenter.nsta.org/files/ss0609_38.pdf We could basically teach our entire unit based on this book. It provides real life examples of why students need to learn how to understand, record, and present data in graphs and pictures. Additionally it includes 30 ready made classroom activities and explanations on how to address common misconceptions among our students. Online resource: http://www.nctm.org/publications/more4u. (password: DDG00792)

Textbook

Website

Developing Data-Graph Comprehension in Grades k-8 by Frances R. Curcio (published by NCTM)

Book

IDEAS: NCTM Standards-Based Instruction--Grades 5-8 published by NCTM Focus in Grades 6-8: Teaching with Curriculum Focal Points by Amy Mirra (published by NCTM 2009) Saxon Math 87: An Incremental Development (seccond edition) published by Hake Saxon 1999 Chapin & Johnson, Math Matters, Understanding the Math You Teach Grades K-8. Math Solutions Publications, 2006. Website for creating graphs: http://nces.ed.gov/nces kids/createagraph/defa ult.aspx?ID=ffd51b2a8 233479e8054b6e606ff 1bdd NancyLee Bergey

Book

This book provides creative activities that require only paper and pencil. For the activities on graphing, it ties together topics from all subject areas. The ideas could be reworked to incorporate our science topic easily. This books gives the main ideas and important aspects of data interpretation to focus on and where data interpretation fits into the larger middle school curriculum. While it does provide examples of specific tasks and activities, this book is more of a resource to make sure we dont get arent losing the bigger picture when we teach our unit. Textbook for high 7th graders and low 8th graders (seems perfect for our class) that thoroughly, but concisely explains every topic. It has lessons covering every topic we are expected to teach, practice problems, and investigations surrounding those topics. It is an excellent resource for us to plan our whole class instruction from. This book focuses on the conceptual over the procedural teaching of math. It is much more concern with the why behind the steps than the correct answer associated with the step allowing a teacher to contextualize the math for the students and answer all the why questions. For our topic it emphasizes how data is represented everywhere and the importance of the measures of central tendencies.

There are only 5 activities that deal with graphing and we would have to rework them to blend with our science topic. This is more of a grounding resource. While it does give examples of what 8th graders work should look like and tasks for data interpretation, it doesnt go into the specific objectives for each lesson or specific tasks for each topic in the unit. This textbook doesnt have a web application to present the lesson to the students (they are used to having the book shown on the smartboard). The units dont incorporate our science topic. This textbook addresses the enduring understandings and the common misconceptions students have with the topic based on general age. It doesnt break down the mathematical content by grade level which means it is mainly a resource for teachers to use to inform pedagogy. The students havent used this site before, so while we find it user friendly and it is made for students, there will be a learning curve at the beginning.

Book

Textbook

Book

Website

This site is a good first step to have the students use technology to graph. It provides the proper scaffolding for inputting the data and provides examples of actual graphs for students to reference. Students dont need their own email account to email the graphs to the teacher from this site--collection of their work convenient.

Person

She is familiar with the science curriculum and volunteered to provide the materials for exploring minerals. She has extensive experience teaching science.

She works at Penn, not our school so we do not have easy access to her during the day.