Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading
Three Guiding Principles
1. Engage students in firsthand and secondhand investigations to make sense of the natural world.
Scientists learn about the natural world in a variety of ways. Scientists conduct firsthand investigations—they make observations, conduct tests and experiments, model scientific phenomena, gather data, and search for evidence. Scientists also rely on what they learn from secondhand sources, such as books, articles, reports, presentations, and correspondence with peers.
Reading and scientific investigation are both acts of inquiry—students read and investigate to find out. They learn about the world and develop their own work by reading science books and articles and interpreting and critiquing other scientists’ data and claims. Scientists work iteratively between firsthand (experiential) and secondhand (text) information, and the Seeds/Roots approach similarly provides students with an authentic balance of learning opportunities from both firsthand investigations and secondhand sources.
Each unit provides opportunities for students to find, evaluate, and interpret evidence both in firsthand situations and from secondhand sources, especially the student science books. Negotiating this interplay between firsthand second-hand sources of information is something we do all of our lives— even if we don’t choose a career in science. We learn a new skill like driving both by reading/learning the traffic laws and by practice actually driving. Making sense of the world and navigating daily life require a lot of skill in reconciling different sources of evidence—some of it gathered through experience and investigation (firsthand) and some from books, media, and conversations (secondhand). In the Seeds/Roots curriculum, students have the opportunity to develop all of these skills.
2. Employ multiple learning modalities.
The Seeds/Roots approach expands the classic inquiry science instructional model. In most inquiry science approaches, students engage in firsthand experiences, such as systematic observation or experimentation, and reflect upon those experiences, usually through discussion.
Seeds/Roots employs a multimodal instructional model called the Do-it, Talk-it, Read-it, Write-it approach. Students engage with important learning goals—in science and literacy—through multimodal experiences.
For example, students might learn about an organism and its adaptations by observing that organism and its behavior in a firsthand way, by discussing their observations and inferences with others, by reading about what others have observed or about things that are not observable in a firsthand way, and then by writing to communicate what they have learned and still wonder. Students engage with each unit’s priority learning goals through at least three out of the four modalities.
3. Capitalize on science-literacy synergies.
The Seeds of Science/Roots of Reading™ approach capitalizes on potential synergies between science and literacy. Synergies might be thought of as the “sweet spots” between the two domains: the places where science and literacy share highly complementary—sometimes identical—learning goals or cognitive processes.
Seeds/Roots units are designed to help students learn essential science concepts and how to express these concepts using academic language, develop a set of cognitive skills that are generative and transferable across disciplines, and come to know the nature and practices of science and literacy.
Through the program’s emphasis on these shared strategies in science and literacy, students begin to understand that reasoning and strategic meaning-making cross curricular boundaries. This helps to develop enduring dispositions, rather than promote isolated skills. Students learn to bring their inquiry skills and comprehension and composition strategies to bear on issues and problems they encounter across the curriculum and even outside of school.
| Making predictions | • | • |
| Posing questions | • | • |
| Making explanations from evidence | • | • |
| Making inferences | • | • |
| Summarizing | • | • |
| Searching for information in text | • | • |
| Communicating conclusions | • | • |
| Engaging in discourse | • | • |
| Constructing meaning | • | • |
| Interpreting meaning | • | • |
| Writing reflections | • | • |