Workshop Overview

Photograph of two teachers using the hand-cranked motor and propeller.

The Focus on Energy Workshop and follow-up sessions empower elementary teachers to incorporate foundational energy ideas accurately and effectively in their own curriculum. The face-to-face workshop includes three strands:

Explore core ideas about energy

  • Engage in hands-on, standards-based classroom activities
  • Use science practices such as model-building and constructing scientific explanations
  • Probe and refine your own energy ideas while guided by a scientist
  • Learn to track the flow of energy from collisions to sunlight shining on solar panels

Learn to build on students’ ideas about energy

  • Listen to children talk about energy, read transcripts of interviews with children, and examine student work
  • Identify productive ideas and practices that students bring to their studies

Plan to integrate energy learning in your classroom

  • Reflect on how and where workshop activities and experiences can strengthen your science curriculum
  • Propose how you will build these activities into your science program
Photograph of teachers doing an activity with the propeller at a PD Workshop.

Photos from the PD Workshop at Tufts.

Why is Energy Important? (pdf)

Our Model for Energy (pdf)

Forms and Evidence of Energy (jpg)