What are "essential questions," and how do they differ from other kinds of questions? What's so great about them? Why should you design and use essential questions in your classroom? Essential questions (EQs) help target standards as you organize curriculum content into coherent units that yield focused and thoughtful learning. In the classroom, EQs are used to stimulate students' discussions and promote a deeper understanding of the content. Whether you are an Understanding by Design (UbD) devotee or are searching for ways to address standards—local or Common Core State Standards—in an engaging way, Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins provide practical guidance on how to design, initiate, and embed inquiry-based teaching and learning in your classroom. Offering dozens of examples, the authors explore the usefulness of EQs in all K-12 content areas, including skill-based areas such as math, PE, language instruction, and arts education. As an important element of their backward design approach to designing curriculum, instruction, and assessment, the authors *Give a comprehensive explanation of why EQs are so important; *Explore seven defining characteristics of EQs; *Distinguish between topical and overarching questions and their uses; *Outline the rationale for using EQs as the focal point in creating units of study; and *Show how to create effective EQs, working from sources including standards, desired understandings, and student misconceptions. Using essential questions can be challenging—for both teachers and students—and this book provides guidance through practical and proven processes, as well as suggested "response strategies" to encourage student engagement. Finally, you will learn how to create a culture of inquiry so that all members of the educational community—students, teachers, and administrators—benefit from the increased rigor and deepened understanding that emerge when essential questions become a guiding force for learners of all ages.

Pan-Canadian Science Place encourages children to explore and investigate their world, and to develop important science process skills such as observing, predicting, hypothesizing, interpreting, and problem solving. This booklet contains many different assessment tools and strategies for grades 4-6.

Help your grade 6 students explore standards-based science concepts and vocabulary using 150 daily lessons A variety of rich resources including vocabulary practice, hands-on science activities, and comprehension tests in multiple-choice format help you successfully introduce students to earth, life, and physical science concepts. 30 weeks of instruction covers many standards-based science topics.

It's a big world out there, and it's populated with millions of different species of plants, animals, and microorganisms! Available in paperback, Biodiversity: Explore the Diversity of Life on Earth with Science Activities for Kids introduces middle school readers to the evolution of life on Earth, beginning with the first single-celled organisms that emerged 3.8 billion years ago to the complex multi-celled organisms that exist today and make up the tree of life. Science-minded, hands-on experiments make this a book a fully immersive learning experience!

The series Tools for Instructions and Reading Assessment is a companion piece to Dr. Jennifer Katz's book Teaching to Diversity. The series, which supports the three-block model of universal design for learning, offers two instructional guides, A Model Unit and Reading Assessment Program Guide for each grade from 1 to 12. The Reading Assessment Program Guide includes: A guide that focuses on how to assess students' progress in reading comprehension and fluency/decoding Accompanying blackline masters and grade-specific rubrics Four levelled Reading Passages to use for assessment throughout the school year