Learning to Measure in Middle School Science

Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

I teach 6th, 7th and 8th grade science in an urban, high-need charter school. My students are inquisitive and bright, and I have had the pleasure of working with these students for the past 4 years. Our school strives to meet the unique needs of our students by providing them with a rigorous, holistic education--both in academics and character development. In my science classroom in particular, I have been developing a hands-on, standards-based curriculum to help our students foster a love for science as well as master scientific concepts.

My students are all inquisitive and bright, and want to do real science during science class. However, we often lack the resources we need to do the experiments and activities I would like for the students to complete. We are most often under-funded, and although we do our best to be creative with our resources, my students and I as their teacher still do not have what we need. It is a challenge to justify spending our limited funds on the high-quality science tools we would like for use in my classroom. Furthermore, my students have consistent difficulty in mathematics. I would like to be able to link mathematics with science through the use of new, accurate measuring tools as part of the science curriculum.

I would like to get several different types of measuring tools for my students to use in the classroom. I am requesting spring scales, a triple beam balance, tape measurers, rulers, and a digital scale. These tools would enable us to do exciting investigations on density, volume and mass. These tools would also help my students understand these concepts better, and give them experience in using real laboratory tools, just like real scientists use. These tools would help link science with mathematic concepts, deepening the students knowledge in mathematical thinking and hands-on, relevant computation. They can furthermore use these tools to help them learn how to measure both in the metric and English systems, which is difficult for them, but important for them to know.

Your help will make it possible for my students to learn how to measure mass, volume, weight and density, as well as improve their real-world math skills. My students will be able to do so many exciting and engaging experiments and investigations with these new tools. I really appreciate all of your help and so do my students!