When members of an orchestra tune their instruments before a big concert I imagine there is a high level of anticipatory excitement. That is exactly how I felt yesterday at the Seacoast Science Center (SSC).
I had the fantastic opportunity to spend the entire day with two tremendous employees of the SSC, Kate Leavitt and Sarah Toupin. The twenty-four lesson, seven-week rocky shore ecosystem unit is complete, but it will not be ready for its debut until a lot of “tuning” has been done. We spent many hours going over the curriculum with a fine-toothed radula to ensure it aligns extremely well with the Next Generation Science Standards. If you don’t know what a radula is, you should look it up!
While examining the curriculum we also did something that I was not planning for but am very excited about – we aligned each lesson to the Ocean Literacy Principles. These seven detailed principles were created by educators from kindergarten through college, researches from multiple ocean science disciplines, education policymakers, science coordinators from departments of education and federal agency representatives involved in education.
The seven principles were developed to promote ocean literacy: the understanding of the ocean’s influence on humans and our influence on the ocean. You can find the seven principles HERE. The correlations between the Next Generation Science Standards and the Ocean Literacy Principles and Concepts can be found HERE.
Besides ensuring that the standards and the lesson content aligned, we also spent a lot of time making necessary revisions to produce a user-friendly document for educators. A major objective of mine in the creation of this unit is to guarantee teachers that this curriculum will be an easy and enjoyable unit to implement in their classrooms.
The “finished” curriculum should be available at some point in April! However, my continued hope will be that this FREE ecosystem unit available to all educators will be a “living” document. As time passes and I receive valuable feedback from educators, necessary improvements will be made to increase the learning experiences of all students participating in the lessons provided by this resource.
A HUGE thanks once again to the Seacoast Science Center for all their collaborative efforts in the development and promotion of this curriculum.
One final question and answer to reflect upon…What did the ocean say to the beachgoers? Nothing…it just waved.
Thom R. Smith 