Life Science & Everyday Thinking
Life Science and Everyday Thinking is a one-semester curriculum designed in part for prospective or practicing elementary teachers. The course uses a student-oriented pedagogy with a life-science content focus as well as a unique Learning about Learning component.
Available as a package or for individual purchase
E-Book
Professional Learning
Inquiry-Based
Learning
A guided-inquiry, life science curriculum for pre-service and in-service K-5 teachers.
Unique Learning about Learning Component
Students directly engage in metacognitive activities that allow them to explore how they as students learn science.
Total Support
for Instructors
In person and online support, educational webinars, lesson modeling, and much more is available from our Professional Learning Team.
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Curriculum Details
Life Science and Everyday Thinking (LSET) is a lab-based introductory biology course designed to be taught in one 15-week semester, with 6 lab hours of instruction per week. There are options for excluding certain chapters to fit a 10-week quarter with either an ecosystem focus or with a more cellular focus.
Life Science and Everyday Thinking is Inquiry-Based
The central principle of LSET is that students construct a meaningful understanding of central ideas in biology through inquiry-based experiences and social interaction. Every chapter opens with a formative assessment designed to elicit students’ prior knowledge. The activities, which follow, allow students to construct the targeted scientific concepts themselves using evidence from their own observations, experiments, and investigations.
Life Science and Everyday Thinking Includes a Unique Learning about Learning Component
In this section, students directly engage in metacognitive activities that allow them to explore how they as students learn science.
In this introductory chapter, through investigations and discussions, students develop a list of characteristics of living organisms. They begin to consider the interactions between the living and the nonliving components of an ecosystem during a walk in a nearby ecosystem. Students also begin to understand the practices of science by conducting simple experiments investigating the effects of nonliving things on plants.
Life Science & Everyday Thinking Developers & Contributors
Deborah Donovan, John Rousseau, Irene Salter, Leslie Atkins, Alejandro Acevedo-Gutierrez, Rene Kratz, Carolyn Landel, Val Mullen, Pamela Pape-Lindstrom