Science

The Skyline science courses are highly interactive, with hands-on learning opportunities that support peer-to-peer interactions and laboratory experiences/digital simulations that allow students to test their hypotheses.

The curriculum offers UDL (Universal Design for Learning) supports in every lesson, supporting the comprehension of scientific phenomena while practicing the skills or standards through alternate processes. Additionally, each lesson contains specific English learner supports across the various English proficiency levels, including a WIDA Model Performance Indicator table to help teachers support their students in English language development alongside content knowledge development.

Additional lesson supports include recommendations for differentiating learning experiences, content background knowledge to support teachers, SEL recommendations specific to activities, graphic organizers for students and teachers, among many other things. Notably, robust guidance for instructional routines are provided for each grade band. These documents cover Discussion, Questioning, and Eliciting and Leveraging Student Experience routines. Additional resources are provided that summarize routines and provide quick reference for sentence starters and guiding questions.

The Skyline science courses also include various types of assessments. Formative assessments provide informational opportunities for students to demonstrate their understanding and proficiency. Teacher facilitation guides provide guidance to help teachers identify evidence of understanding and make instructional decisions moving forward. In grades K-8, Chapter-level Critical Juncture Assessments are more formal assessments that probe understanding of the chapter-level concepts and essential questions. In high school, Transfer Tasks are lesson-level assessments that assess understanding of the lesson-level concepts and three-dimensional learning objectives.

In grades K-8, every unit also includes a Pre-Unit Assessment and an End-of-Unit Assessment that are aligned to each other and to the performance expectations of the unit. In grades K-5, these assessments are most often performance-based, asking students to explain a phenomenon using words and visual models. In grades 6-8, students participate in a Socratic Seminar discussion that provides insight into their ability to explain unit phenomena as well as the End-of-Unit Assessment, which uses rigorous multiple-choice questions and free-response questions to identify student progress in the unit.

In high school, each unit includes a Unit Summative Assessment that assesses proficiency of the three-dimensional learning objectives from each lesson in the unit. These assessments include free-response questions that allow students to synthesize their learning from the unit to make sense of a new phenomenon.

Classroom Materials

The Skyline digital curriculum is fully available to all district educators and their students. In addition to the online resources, the Science courses include non-digital materials (e.g., classroom kits, investigation notebooks). Please review the Comprehensive Skyline Required Texts/Materials List to preview the non-digital materials associated with the Science curriculum.