SCIENCE STORIES helps preservice and inservice teachers contextualize what it looks like to engage their students in meaningful science experiences. Using narratives about science teaching and learning in real-world classrooms, this text demonstrates important content and strategies in action. Author Janice Koch's approach guides teachers in discovering and exploring their "scientific selves," enabling them to learn from students' experiences and become effective scientific explorers in their own classrooms. Featuring connections to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), the text empowers teachers to infuse science into their classrooms by answering such questions as, “Where do I start?” and “How do I use the new standards?” SCIENCE STORIES contains comprehensive chapters on key science disciplinary core ideas, such as life science, physical science, and earth and space science, as well as a chapter that considers student assessment and self-assessment.

1. Science Teaching and You: Locating Your Scientific Self.
2. Teachers and Students as Science Learners.
3. Engaging Students in Scientific and Engineering Practices.
4. Scientific Explorations Inside and Outside the Classroom.
5. Exploring Matter: Scientific Observations of Everyday Materials.
6. Plants and Animals and Extended Investigations.
7. Physical Science Explorations: Density and Its Implications.
8. Using Models and Engineering Design for Teaching and Learning Science.
9. Beyond the "Science Kit".
10. Content and Curriculum: Science Concepts and Your Scientific Self.
11. Surrounded by Science: Science Connections Across Disciplines.
12. Creating the Science Experience in Your Classroom: Planning and Letting Go.
13. What's the Big Idea? Matching Assessment to Instruction.
14. Pulling It All Together.

SCIENCE STORIES helps preservice and inservice teachers contextualize what it looks like to engage their students in meaningful science experiences. Using narratives about science teaching and learning in real-world classrooms, this text demonstrates important content and strategies in action. Author Janice Koch's approach guides teachers in discovering and exploring their "scientific selves," enabling them to learn from students' experiences and become effective scientific explorers in their own classrooms. Featuring connections to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), the text empowers teachers to infuse science into their classrooms by answering such questions as, “Where do I start?” and “How do I use the new standards?” SCIENCE STORIES contains comprehensive chapters on key science disciplinary core ideas, such as life science, physical science, and earth and space science, as well as a chapter that considers student assessment and self-assessment. The integration of engineering practices is infused throughout the text, including the use of design portfolios as tools to assist students in the design process, and strategies for using engineering design to assess scientific knowledge when appropriate. Both favorite and NEW science stories model the application of the Next Generation Science Standards to the classroom. New stories focus on urban science students and the ways in which nature outside the classroom door can be a vehicle to learn science. A newly revised chapter is devoted solely to the significant conceptual underpinnings in life, physical, and earth and space sciences. Numbered Learning Objectives, listed at the beginning of each chapter and correlated with main headings throughout the chapter, guide students as they read. The objectives also make it easy for students and instructors to find key content and understand expected outcomes. Professional Resource Downloads include figures, forms, and other useful documents that are downloadable and often customizable. For example, Chapter 4 includes a guide and chart for students to use outdoors to record observations of trees. The Professional Resource Download label identifies these items throughout the text. SCIENCE STORIES presents much of the book's theory and practical advice through its illustrations of students and teachers in grades K–8 actually doing science together. Connections to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are explored and thoroughly integrated throughout the text. The stories bring the standards to life. Explicit illustrations of teachers engaging students in engineering design illustrate the science and engineering practices of the NGSS. Attention to environmental science stories and locally relevant science experiences (e.g., those concerning issues of conservation or sustainability) encourages young learners to think about the quality of their natural environment and the impact of human development on it. SCIENCE STORIES addresses the theory and practice of science teaching through a clear and conversational voice that invites readers to (1) locate their own scientific selves and (2) engage their students in science and engineering practices that allow them to make sense of the natural world and apply that knowledge to other areas of thinking and learning.