Updated Tools for Teachers: Journals and Monographs

Each of our journals and monographs (and their accompanying articles) have an educator guide tab (highlighted in green above). This tab has everything an educator might need to incorporate the publication into their classroom lessons:

• national standards alignments,
• a step-by-step guide to the format of a Natural Inquirer article,
• suggested lesson plans, and
• supplemental resources.

Use the sidebar menu (Jump to) to navigate to the section you want to see.

We include alignments to Next Generation Science Standards, Common Core Reading Standards, and National Social Studies Standards. These three groups can be expanded by clicking on their titles. Once expanded, you’ll be able to see every standard the article addresses.

Hover your cursor over a particular standard to read the text of the standard.

And coming soon: a new way to search our materials by standard!

How is a Natural Inquirer article set up? What can you teach with the different sections of the article? What other resources connect to these article sections? Read through “What’s in a Natural Inquirer Article” to find out! This section of the educator guide is simply called “Educator Guide” in the sidebar menu.

In this section, we walk through each part of a Natural Inquirer article – from “Meet the Scientists” all the way to “Discussion.” We explain the purpose of each section, and we give you some suggestions for how you might use that part of the article in your classroom. We also provide some suggestions for other topics or resources that might be helpful in your lesson planning.

Next in the educator guide tab is the lesson plan section. Here we suggest three lesson plans that would work well with the journal or monograph. Sometimes these lesson plans are made specifically for that publication. In other cases, the lesson plans are more general and could be used with any Natural Inquirer article.

Many of the lesson plans are strategies for students to use when reading informational texts. These lesson plans help students analyze and summarize the main points, compare two different texts, or think through the implications of the study’s findings.

We suggest three for each publication, but there are lots more! Just click on “Lesson Plans” in the Resources menu to search our complete list. There you can narrow your search by grade level or topic.

In this final section of the educator guide, you’ll find downloadable pdfs of relevant education files. Most notably, this section has the answer guide to the reflection section questions that appear throughout the article. (Note: the education files are only available on the article view.)

Following the downloadable files is a section on the Project Learning Tree correlations. If you are a trained Project Learning Tree educator, you can access the suggested activities as a supplement to concepts addressed in the publication.

We hope you find these updated educator guides helpful. We’re always trying to improve our offerings to make using Natural Inquirer as easy and seamless as possible. We’re still rolling out these updated guides in all our journal and monograph product and article pages, so if your favorite isn’t up yet, don’t worry – it will be soon!

And there’s even more to come! Keep an eye out for:

• A new general educator guide that provides an overview of the Natural Inquirer program and our thousands of free resources
• New grade level educator guides, including one for nonformal educators
• Updated educator guides for our Readers and Investi-gator journals
• Advanced search options for sorting resources by education standard

We’re excited to help you make the most of Natural Inquirer resources and products!