Tried Strategy That Worked Great

The nature of science requires students to learn a lot of new vocabulary words. Two strategies that worked really well in the 7th/8th grade integrated science classroom I'm currently placed in is relating the content to the students' everyday lives and using a word wall. The students are learning about cells and the basic structure and function of the cell. Cells are strange collections of organelles that have names like Golgi Complex, Endoplasmic Reticulum, Ribosomes, and Cytoplasm. Not only do these organelles have strange names, they look really weird too. We used a word wall by constructing two posters out of a large sheet of red paper and another large sheet of green paper. The red paper was cut into a round shape to resemble an animal cell. The green paper was cut into a rectangular shape to resemble a plant cell. When introducing the parts of the cell, we wrote the parts that are found in both cell types on both posters. Those parts found only in plant cells, we wrote on the green poster only. We did the same thing with the functions of the cells. To relate the parts of the cell to the students' everyday lives, we used analogies to factories when describing the organelle functions. The students did quite well on their quiz last week and they will be taking their unit test tomorrow. I have high hopes they will do just as well on their test.