Get Ready to Teach about Energy!

The Focus on Energy teachers’ guide is a treasure trove! It has everything you need to prepare, set up, and enact three sequential curriculum units (each a set of 4-5 investigations) focused on Motion, Thermal, and Electrical Energy and an Engineering Design Challenge.

Before you dive into the teachers’ guide, we recommend that you become familiar with three resources:

• Key Curriculum Features describes critical elements of the curriculum’s innovative approach for teaching and learning about energy in grades 4-5.
• A Teaching Framework to Reflect a New Vision shows how each lesson is structured to ensure that students develop understanding of science ideas and practices together.
• Many teachers kick off the unit with the Optional Sparklz Assessment to excite student interest. It can also serve as a pre/post assessment.

You may also want to become familiar with these resources:

• Links to Standards 
• Kit order information
• A Description of the Formative Assessment  system
• Resource Quick Links that allow you to easily access many more resources embedded in the teachers’ guide, including videos and essays, that you can use to deepen your own understanding of energy ideas, practices, and pedagogy.
• Resources for Diverse Science Learners