On July 14 and 15, 2002, 26 FOSS educators from 15 school districts around the country traveled to Boulder, Colorado, for the first FOSS Materials Management Symposium. The purpose of the symposium was simply to share strategies and procedures for maintaining FOSS kits. That is, once the decision has been made to adopt FOSS as a district's science program and the kits are purchased, how do you ensure that the kits will be in A-1 condition for teacher after teacher to teach science efficiently?
Responding to the urgency of raising language arts test scores and meeting California API goals (Accountability Performance Index), most California elementary schools have stated as a primary instructional goal the integration of language arts and reading with other content areas. In actuality, schools are looking for innovations packaged as reading or literacy programs.
A pond in Crofton, Maryland, has become the home of a non-native, predatory fish called the northern snakehead.
Have you noticed the science extension suggestions that are part of each FOSS investigation? A museum or science center in your community may be just the right partner for exploring them. This is the story of one collaboration that is helping enrich and support FOSS in Port Townsend, Washington, elementary schools. Hopefully, it will inspire you to find and develop a similar relationship in your community.
It happened on March 23, 2002. Parachutes were flying, pinwheels were spinning, electromagnets were transforming energy, and model cars were racing down ramps. Excitement, enthusiasm, and inquiry were in the air. Problem solving, critical thinking, and communication skills were free flowing as ideas, information, and discussions buzzed around like bees gathering nectar.
Last summer the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston hosted a weeklong workshop on the FOSS Middle School Planetary Science Course. Can you imagine a better place to have this workshop?!
A comment last fall over supper with Larry Woolf led to a conversation in January. That conversation started the planning process that culminated in the FOSS Electronics weeklong summer workshop at General Atomics, June 23–28, 2002.
On April 29, 2002, I got a thick envelope in the mail from Bellevue, Washington. Inside was a letter from Craig Parsley, 5th-grade teacher at Newport Heights Elementary School, and a stack of letters from his students...