Current Science News Seminar Supplemental or Sub Plan Activity

This Current Science News Seminar activity is a way for you to get your students to pay attention to current news in science, practice their summarizing skills, and develop higher-order questions about an article's content! Students will choose a science news article from the past 30 days from publications like Scientific American, New Scientist, Discover Magazine, etc. They will follow the directions to write a concise but quality summary and to develop 'quiz' questions that fall under one of three categories (low, medium, and high-level questions using specific verbs from Bloom's Taxonomy). Then, each student will give a short presentation to a small 'seminar' group and their audience will take notes and then take the presenter's 'quiz' to test their listening skills and their presenter's summarizing skills!

Your students do all the work here and everyone gets to learn about lots of interesting, new science research! This works as a great sub plan or an end of unit assignment to give students a chance to see how the principals of science are being applied in the real world every day. I have used this once each marking quarter to ensure that my students are exposed to fresh findings in science and to improve their scientific literacy. Some students even get really into it and design graphic organizers and posters for their seminars! This assignment is also easily converted to a digital assignment if you have your students turn it in through Google Classroom or another platform.

Detailed student instructions and a grading rubric are included in the download.

Thanks for looking!

Sunrise Science