
Karen and I are back together again, excited to be working with teachers again in new courses for Summer 2021.
This summer we wanted to focus on helping teachers face the challenges of 2021! The science teacher professional development courses we built really have a common theme: scaffolding and working with individual students with individual needs in a year coming up where many students will have unique needs!
As we began planning for the summer, we both decided to create “mini”-courses focused on more specific teaching topics. In our 2021 courses this year, teachers will learn with slightly-shorter video lessons, but encounter a larger number of ready-to-print resources. Some of these resources they can use to plan lessons and some of these resources are meant to be print-ready for use right away in their own classrooms!
Karen created two courses focused on getting the teacher away from the “sage on stage” teaching methods: Unit Menus: Empowering Students With Choice AND Flip Like An Expert: Flipping Your Classroom. Using these two strategies like Karen does in her own classroom helps students to become more active in their learning and also provides the teacher with more “off-stage” time to help individual students with needs. These courses are absolutely essential to every teacher who is looking into creating more independent learning opportunities (and creating more one-on-one time in the classroom as well).

I (Bethany) set out to create two science teacher professional development courses focused on two topics near and dear to my heart, topics that many teachers will need this coming school year. With the past year being in and out, virtual, hybrid, in-person mix, quarantines… many students will need help catching up with both mathematical skills and literacy skills, and I firmly believe that science teachers are both math and literacy teachers!

In each of our science classes, there may be a few students who excel at applying math to the scientific problems and challenges they come across, but there are many students who struggle to connect the science and math parts of their brains! And literacy is really all about being able to communicate: being able to communicate thoughts and knowledge (including scientific discoveries) and being able to read and understand what others have communicated in writing. Learning how to apply math and learning how to communicate are really two essential skills in every career field, but especially important in science!
In my Building Math Skills in Science Class and Building Literacy Skills in Science Class courses, I give you tools and strategies, printable scaffolded plans, graphic organizers, and unique math for science or science literacy activities you can use in your classroom to help your science students build up the math and literacy skills they really need!
All of our science teacher professional development courses will begin July 5th, 2021 and our courses will run all summer until September 30, 2021. There will be a Facebook Group just for Teacher Prep Room students and we can’t wait to discuss these topics with you.
We can’t wait to get started in these courses! The pre-sale begins June 28th, 2021. You can find more information about our courses here on our main Teacher Prep Room page. If you’re interested in all four new courses for Summer 2021, you can also purchase all 4 with the money-saving bundle.