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Hi I'm Karla! Thanks for visiting my blog! I'm a middle school science teacher from New Jersey. I'm happy that you are here!

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Ideas and Teaching Resources for Busy Middle School Science Teachers! 📓🧪🔬💡🌘

Build a Satellite Models! After we studied satelli

Build a Satellite Models! After we studied satellites during our Intro to Earth and Space Science unit, students built satellite models. I love how they turned out!! Especially my personal favorite Earth-studying satellite, GRACE-FO 🌊 🛰️ I’m excited to hang them from the ceiling of my classroom! #middleschoolscience #iteachscience #earthandspacescienceteacher #satelliteproject #iteachearthscience #6thgradescience #iteachearthandspacescience #earthscienceteacher

✨ So special that we could see the Aurora from N

✨ So special that we could see the Aurora from New Jersey last night. My students were tripping since we just studied the Aurora last week! All of them came skittering in this morning to tell me that they got a photo at their soccer practice! ✨

Index cards, mini LEDs, coin cell batteries and al

Index cards, mini LEDs, coin cell batteries and aluminum foil make for a great diagnostic activity for one of the first days or weeks of school when you need a crash course on how your students work and behave!

This light-up name plate activity will help you assess right away who learns quickly, who asks for a lot of help, who perseveres, who gives up, who spends wayyy too much time drawing or coloring, who stays on task, who gets up and walks around aimlessly, and much more! I literally take notes about my students while they are working on this!!!

One big theme this year was that the girls rocked it!!!

💡 Comment LIGHT below and I’ll send you a link to this free activity on my blog!

#middleschoolscience #iteachmiddleschoolscience #backtoschoolscience

Isn’t it fun to see how a boring, gray, clean sl

Isn’t it fun to see how a boring, gray, clean slate classroom becomes filled with cozy color, warmth, laughs, and learning?! 🎨 💡 📓 🧪 👩‍🏫

Check out my classroom prep list of tried and tested ideas, organization systems, and game-changing products that cozy up my classroom every year to make it a great space for my students to learn!

Comment COZY below and I’ll send you a link to the post!

A veteran science teacher at my school tried to ta

A veteran science teacher at my school tried to talk me out of this but I didn’t listen and I’m so glad that I didn’t listen because this experience was so worth it. I wanted to share this.

We rented a StarLab portable planetarium for our school last week from a community college in New Jersey. The money came through a grant from our PTO. It is an analog projector and relatively simple technology but there are over 3000 points of light, accurate in relative brightness and color. Once your eyes adjust to the dark, it’s wonderous! We took a break from our regularly scheduled programming in science to have ‘space week’ since we aren’t into our astronomy unit yet.

We did a series of mini lessons on stars, constellations, and galaxies. We printed current sky maps and had the students highlight certain constellations and asterisms and we read some of the myths around them. Three days we took a ‘field trip’ to the StarLab during class. We told everyone to bring clean socks 🧦 on those days 😄

The experience for the students was exciting and fun. After they’d gone into the StarLab once, they came rushing into class each day after asking if we were going to the StarLab again. Many kids told me that they were ‘going to miss the StarLab’!

The engagement with the night sky was stellar. We did lessons on Polaris, how to find various constellations, the zodiac constellations, how the sun rises at different latitudes throughout the year, Greek mythology and the Native American skies. On the last day we passed around the laser pointer as the sky was rotating and had each student point to the North Star, the Big Dipper, the Milky Way, and Orion’s Belt. They loved this challenge! We received 100% positive feedback from our students ✨ “I really liked the StarLab. Crawling in and looking at the stars in person. It felt like reality! Now I know how what stars to look for when I stargaze at the sky. It was so worth it and I would love to do it again sometime.”

I got to bring my 4 year old son, which was also a treat. Have you used a StarLab before?

My students showed so much passion and creativity

My students showed so much passion and creativity with their Plastics Public Service Announcement projects 🌊🐠🐟🪼🐬🐋 … they could create anything from a poster to a commercial to a slideshow to a sculpture. Many of them chose to do beach clean ups and a data analysis of their haul. Some chose to research policies or organizations. My classroom looks like a museum now. Hopefully we will make a little positive ripple of change in the world 🌎
#middleschoolscience #middleschoolscienceteacher #earthscienceteacher #iteachearthscience #plasticintheocean #plasticsproject #earthscienceproject

🦕✨ For years I tried to find a fossil making

🦕✨ For years I tried to find a fossil making activity with a specific and concise lab procedure for my students to follow. I wanted a hands-on activity while I was teaching about sedimentary layers and the fossil record… but I didn’t want it to be too elementary…

I never found one!

That’s why I designed this “make a fossil” lab. Students follow a procedure to precisely measure the ingredients to make their plaster of Paris … they have to use graduated cylinders, scales, and some glassware so they are practicing skills while they design their own cast fossil using mini dinosaur figurines and seashells.

After two days of drying, my students couldn’t wait to excavate their fossils… and they were psyched to take their fossil home as a souvenir!

You can grab this activity with lots of teacher notes and the student lab sheet for free on my blog (🦖 link in bio)!

#middleschoolscience #middleschoolscienceteacher #geologichistory #fossillab #earthscienceteacher #earthsciencelab #handsonscience #fossilrecord #geologichistory #iteachearthscience

🔥❄️ If you have some food coloring, a clear

🔥❄️ If you have some food coloring, a clear shoebox, an electric kettle, and hot plate, you can do these demonstrations to teach your students about convection in Earth’s mantle as part of your Plate Tectonics unit. This series of demonstrations has proven to help students to understand density of hot and cold fluids, how convection currents form, and how convection in the mantle affects the surface of our planet. Check out this lesson in my store! Digital and paper versions are included … along with a mini lesson on strong modeling and ideas for group/class modeling activities! — ✨ search convection in my store ✨
#middleschoolearthscience #iteachearthscience #earthscienceteacher #iteachscience #scienceteacher #scienceteachers #scienceteachersofinstagram #678science #middleschoolscienceteacher #middleschoolscience

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