Lab-Aids® provides several useful tools to guide you and your students through the Science & Sustainability course:
Student Book
The Science and Sustainability, Revised Edition Student Book guides investigations and provides related readings.
The Student Book uses a variety of approaches to make science accessible for all students. SEPUP’s integrated literacy strategies help students process new science content, develop their analytical skills, make connections between related concepts, and express their knowledge orally and in writing. The built-in assessment system helps teacher’s identify students’ strengths and weaknesses from the beginning of the course. This allows them to adjust activities when needed so that all students get the best chance to build their knowledge and appreciation of science.
Teacher's Guide
The Teacher’s Guide provides full support for teaching the program. An electronic version is included with the Complete Materials Package. The printed Teacher’s Guide (not included in Complete Materials Package) is packaged as a series of loose-leaf binders that you can personalize with annotations, rearrangements, and insertions.
SEPUP Core Curriculum Teacher’s Guides take you through each activity in the Student Book and help you see the development of concepts within the big picture of the units and the course you are teaching. It helps you set up the equipment from the kit, organize the classroom, conduct activities, and manage practical details, all of which enhance students’ learning environment. Additional support resources are also found in the Teacher’s Guide.
Material World Book
Material World: A Global Family Portrait by Peter Menzel is a companion resource to the Science and Sustainability program. Although not included in the materials package, a class set of at least one book per each pair of students is highly recommended.
The author spent a week with each of 30 representative families from around the world. He photographed them at work and at play in order to compile this photographic essay of everyday life on earth. In at least one photo from every country, the family is shown with all their worldly possessions displayed around them. These images, together with the comprehensive demographic and other national statistical information about life in each country, provide information that is extremely useful for examining sustainability in the broad sense. Teachers tell us that it is easy to get students to pick up Material World, but hard to get them to put it down!
Books Online
Individual, classroom or district licenses can be purchased for access to our student books on-line. Features include:
All pages were created using Adobe Acrobat Reader. A great feature of the Adobe program is “The Read Aloud Function”. The program audibly reads the text, allowing the student to follow the reading on the page. You can speed up or slow down the program based on the student’s ability. This helps all students increase their vocabulary.
Editable Word documents for each set of Activity Assessment Questions which allows students to e-mail their finished work back to the teacher.
Microsoft Word Tools provide strong support for diverse learners. The Spelling and Grammar Checker uses red and green underline squiggles representing spelling (red) and grammar (green) errors alerting students to potential errors. The thesaurus helps to refine writing as well as expose students to new vocabulary words. Students with poor spelling skills often have difficulty using a dictionary. This feature provides an instant definition for a highlighted word, eliminating the task of dictionary lookup. Students can also use the Thesaurus to find the synonyms of words.
Complete Materials Package
All SEPUP materials packages are designed with teachers, students and environmental considerations in mind. Traditional laboratory style classrooms are not necessary to teach SEPUP.
Materials packages include most of the items needed for the activities. They support multiple classes – typically up to five classes of 32 students (160 total students) – before consumables need to be replaced. It’s important to note that materials are consumed at various rates; therefore, it will not be necessary to replace all consumable items every year.
Exclusive to SEPUP programs are the molded tray liners that keep everything in place and easy to locate – even in a hurry.The complete materials package also includes a DVD containing pdf versions of the Student Book and Teacher's Edition and My Lab-Aids bookshelf for one teacher for 7 years, which includes online access to the Teacher’s Edition and Student Book.
Lab-Aids Science Lab Notebook
The use of a science journal or notebook is strongly recommended for all science classes. A journal not only models the way scientists work but it helps to develop and reinforce students’ science learning and literacy skills.
The Lab-Aids Science Lab Notebook was designed with “Best Practices” in mind. Each of the 160 LABLOG pages, has a 2-column design with GraphAnywhere, which allows data tables and graphs to be drawn in a fraction of the usual time, and plenty of room to record data, notes, and responses to questions. It is also three-hole punched to allow students to store the entire notebook, or individual completed pages, in their binder.
