Building Competence and Confidence in Elementary Science Instruction

This workshop equips elementary teachers with both the content knowledge and instructional strategies necessary to deliver engaging, standards-aligned science lessons. It provides a deep dive into physical, life, earth, and space sciences, while integrating engineering practices and the scientific method in a modern, non-linear way. Teachers explore developmentally appropriate approaches, with a focus on sensemaking, investigation, and data literacy. The session also emphasizes the importance of science notebooks, inquiry-based learning, and cross-disciplinary connections that build both student skills and confidence.

• Gaps in teacher confidence and content knowledge across the science disciplines (physical, life, earth, space).
  
  
• Limited use of authentic scientific and engineering practices in elementary classrooms.
  
  
• Lack of strategies for making science instruction developmentally appropriate, inquiry-driven, and engaging for young learners.

1. Integrating Science and Engineering Practices: Participants will learn how to incorporate the eight Science and Engineering Practices—such as asking questions, developing models, analyzing data, and constructing explanations—into instruction to move beyond memorization toward authentic problem-solving.
   
   
2. Using Developmentally Appropriate Strategies: Teachers will gain concrete strategies for teaching science concepts in age-appropriate ways, such as building data literacy through simple visualizations (bar charts, pictographs, line plots) and expanding to more complex representations like line graphs and scatterplots.
   
   
3. Building Student Engagement Through Inquiry: Educators will practice ways to use science notebooks, hands-on investigations, and local, real-world phenomena to deepen student engagement, encourage sensemaking, and help learners build lasting scientific competence and confidence