Teach Paperless in Your Middle School Science Class!

When quarantine began last March, I was totally overwhelmed with how to deliver content effectively to my distance learners. I know I was not alone in this. My overwhelm was compounded by the shear volume of free online resources for teachers in general and for science teachers. With the sudden pivot to teaching completely online, and with my 6 month old baby practically attached to me at the time, I felt more insecurity about teaching than I had since my first teaching assignment! How could I comb through everything out there to write digital lessons that would engage my students and help them learn in the midst of the trauma that we were all facing?

Don’t miss the FREE SAMPLE LESSONS that I’m providing at the bottom of this post!

Paperless?! Me?! No Way!

For some context, I used to think that I’d never be able to go completely paperless in my classroom. Over the past decade, I have created SO many paper-based resources and activities to teach all kinds of science concepts. While I had made a lot of my teaching materials digital by scanning them as PDFs and uploading them to my Google Drive, up until last Spring, I was still organizing a lot of materials as hard copies in big binders!

However, out of a lot of trial and error through last Spring emerged a solution for how I could organize and deliver science content completely digitally AND take advantage of many of the amazing free science teaching resources available online. Over the summer, as it became clear that school was not going to be anywhere close to normal for a long time, I knew that my curriculum units would need a complete digital conversion and facelift. This school year, I am teaching 6th and 8th grade science in a hybrid format. My students are in two cohorts that alternate coming to school every other day. My students have 1:1 Chromebooks and we can’t do any hands-on labs because of social distancing restrictions.

At face value, this seems like a recipe for ineffective science teaching. Especially considering the nature of the Next Generation Science Standards, which want students to be engaging with phenomena, investigating, problem-solving, modeling, writing arguments, analyzing data, and drawing connections between science domains in a rich and authentic way. All these pressures are enough to make you throw up you hands in surrender!

However, with some creativity, organization, and time, I am writing digital lessons and units now that I feel have fundamentally changed my pedagogy for the better. And bonus, I have not yet made a single photocopy this school year (it’s mid-February)! I want to share with you how I’m structuring my middle school science curriculum this school year during the pandemic. I am certain that I will be using these units every year from here on out– just adding in the hands-on components where possible.

A Unit Overview Doc Helps Me to Plan Comprehensive NGSS-Aligned Units

For each unit, I have created a unit overview Google Doc that is chunked into sections– one for each individual lesson in the unit. On this Doc, I can see everything in one place beginning with the unit introduction and phenomenon and ending with performance assessments, review activities and the post-assessment. The unit unfolds as an NGSS storyline unit. Students investigate, model, and make sense of relevant concepts as they progress through each consecutive lesson. The concepts build towards the understandings that are necessary to answer students’ own initial questions about the topic or ideas about the phenomenon.

What I love about planning on this unit overview Doc is that I can write pieces of lessons and then continually move these pieces up and down in the lesson sequence until they all end up in a place that suits my students’ learning best. The lesson sequence gives students opportunities to engaging with class Jamboards and discussion question boards, virtual interactives and simulations, digital modeling, video clips and associated Google Forms, demonstrations, graphs and data to create and analyze, graphic organizers, readings, mini-labs, and more.

The Most Organized Google Classroom I’ve Ever Had!

My Google Classroom used to be a sort of hodge-podge! I used to teach with a majority of paper-based resources, so my Google Classroom was how I pushed out random assignments to my students. Now, it’s truly the heart of my class. I love that everything is here. My students know where to find their lessons and due dates. Their parents know how to follow along with the course to provide support at home. It doesn’t make a difference if a student is completely remote, hybrid, or in-person every day– everything is here.

After I write each lesson on the unit overview Google Doc, I create a separate Google Doc for each lesson. These are the Google Docs that I share with my students on Google Classroom. So this is the really easy part. Each day, or every other day (or every other other day depending on the lesson), I share a Lesson Doc with my students on Google Classroom. I select Make a Copy for Each Student from the dropdown menu when I create the Assignment. This pushes out the individual Lesson Doc that has a numerical name within the unit (Lesson 1 Geologic Time, Lesson 2 Geologic Time, Lesson 3 Geologic Time, etc.).

(For more Google Classroom fun, check out this blog post!)

Modifications are a Breeze!

My Special Ed teacher and I have such a great rhythm now, too. I draft the on-level lesson as an Assignment in our Google Classroom a few days ahead of time. She pops in there, opens the Doc, Makes a Copy, and modifies what she needs to for our students with IEPs. She can easily make multiple modified versions of the lesson and the delivery is seamless– the students get the version assigned to them.

Additionally, I have one class this year that has an extreme skill level spectrum. To combat this and keep the class running smoothly, I bake enrichment activities into the on-level lessons. This way, my high-fliers and early-finishers can challenge themselves while my Special Ed teacher and I can work with students who are struggling or moving more slowly.

Teacher-Led, Paired Work, or Independent Work . . . It All Works!

Since I have half of my students via Google Meet each class, I share the Lesson Doc to my Google Meet and I also project it on my classroom screen. This way, all of my students can see the Doc at the same time. Now they will have open their own Lesson Doc on their Chromebooks. For some lessons, I ‘walk and talk’ through the activities with them. For other lessons, I might do a quick review of the previous lesson’s big ideas and then have them work independently on the new lesson. For others, I will put the students into breakout rooms (with some in-person students and some remote students paired) to work on the activities together.

Round Out these Units with Cornell Doodle Notes and Pixel Art Review Activities

Throughout these digital units, students engage with content in new ways. The lessons are meant to encourage constructive learning so students develop conceptual understanding before they learn the associated vocabulary. However, to hit the Disciplinary Core Ideas of the standard, I strategically insert Cornell Doodle Notes assignments in the unit. These notes can be assigned digitally too! Read about Cornell Doodle Notes here!

I have also created Abracadabra Pixel Art digital review activities that align to each unit. So once students have completed the lessons in the unit, these activities can be assigned to help your students review the unit’s vocabulary.

I hope that you will check out some of these digital science units in my TPT store. I think they will save you a lot of time. I have combed and sifted through SO many resources online to find the interactives, readings, videos, simulations, and ideas that are most effective and most engaging. I will be adding more of these units to my store as my students finish completing them (guinea pigs!). If you have used one of these units, I’d love to hear your feedback! Feel free to comment below 🙂

Also, I am providing FREE SAMPLE LESSONS from some of my digital units! Click on a button below to receive the free digital lesson!