< Remote Sensing

How to Teach These Units

Take a little time to prepare and get ready to teach. The pages linked below give you an easy-to-follow checklist and resources that get you prepared for facilitating PLANETS activities.

Remote Sensing Family and Community Connections

Strong relationships are key to learner success. Building community and family connections with learners encompasses having ongoing and meaningful two-way interactions between educators and families and/or other communities of supportive adults. It also involves creating a learning environment within OST (Out-of-School Time) programs that is familial, supportive, and empowering. OST programs with strong learning environments and communities recognize the assets that learners bring and allow learners to express themselves, making them feel comfortable engaging in STEM content.

Engaging Family and Community

Here are a few suggestions for connecting with families and community members:

  • Download, print, and send the Family Fliers home with your learners. One is an invitation to join the Share Out at the end of the Unit, the other is a prompt to help make connections and facilitate sharing with family and friends.
  • Connect learners and their families with the STEM Learners webpage for this unit.
  • Invite a guest speaker to share community and/or cultural knowledge on the unit topic.
  • Use this question as a starting point for the guest speaker: “Can you tell a story about why water is important to you and your community?”
  • Invite a guest speaker to share community and/or cultural knowledge on the unit topic.
  • Have beginning, middle, and end meetings with families while doing the unit.
    1. At the first meeting, discuss with families what they would like to share and what they would like to learn. Set some ground rules for how to interact with each other.
    2. At the mid-unit meeting, have families choose from the list of questions on the family fliers and pick one or two to share stories about.
    3. At the Share-Out, make time for learners to share their creations and encourage families to go deeper and share any more details, stories, or concepts that the learning progress sparks for them.

Translatable Glossaries

In order to scaffold learners’ language development during these activities, please use these editable files as needed to support students’ language captured on the Our Ideas poster and in their student notebook.

To support their language development, you can include translations and/or images that your learners will relate to. If you are fluent in your learner’s languages, you can write the translations yourself. If you are not, consider asking a family or community member to help you. There also may be online dictionaries for your learner’s languages like these for American Sign Language: https://atomichands.com/asl-stem-dictionaries/ or https://enablenavajo.org/dine/ for Navajo.

Remember that vocabulary is not intended to be “front-loaded” for learners, but rather it develops as they engage in the activities. To support this development, be sure to leave room for learners to add their own drawings and notes under the words to help them articulate and remember their meanings.”

Science Questions

Send learners home with questions for their families and have them bring answers back to the program. Suggested questions are listed below.

Use these questions for each activity. If you have extra time, you can start each activity with a discussion of what they learned at home and end each activity with a reminder of the next activity’s question.

Can you tell a story about…

…a technology or tool that made a big difference in your life? (Science Activity 1)

…why water is important to our family? (Science Activity 2)

…a memory about the water where we live? (Science Activity 3)

…a landform we live near? (Science Activity 4)

…our landscape / the land on which we live? (Science Activity 5)

…identifying parts of nature that are important to you like

plants, rocks, minerals, animal tracks, etc? (Science Activity 6)

…how you made an important decision? Did you follow a process? Who did you talk to? (Science Activity 7)

Engineering Questions

Use these questions for each activity. If you have extra time, you can start each activity with a discussion of what they learned at home and end each activity with a reminder of the next activity’s question.

Can you tell a story about…

…a technology or tool that made a big difference in your life? (Engineering Activity 1)

…something you built to solve a problem? (Engineering Activity 2)

…a time when you removed distractions and noticed something that

you had missed before? (Engineering Activity 3)

…our landscape / the land on which we live? (Engineering Activity 4)

…an animal that was able to sense something you could not? (Engineering Activity 5)

…building something that was inspired by nature? (Engineering Activity 6)

…something you built that didn’t work or work as you liked? …how did you improve it? (Engineering Activity 7)

…a time when you showed others something you built or created? (Engineering Activity 8)