Back to school 2018 is here! This document will outline the changes you need to be aware of to be successful with the 2018 version of Amplify Science.
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​     Improved teacher resources
​     New teacher resources
​     New NGSS lesson supports
​     New assessment supports
​     New student resources
​     Units with significant revisions
​     Detailed changes to content by grade

 Print Teacher’s Guides are now available for purchase for each unit, containing all of the information found in the digital Teacher’s Guide, including all unit overview documents, complete lesson guides, standards alignment, differentiation strategies, and more. Furthermore, teachers also have the option of downloading individual parts or the entire unit Teacher’s Guide as a PDF file. 

All unit overview documents (“Unit Guide”) are now easier to find and are located just below the list of chapters on each unit page. Materials have been grouped into two sections, “Planning for the Unit” and “Teacher References”, and can now be viewed directly on the curriculum website with no need to download each document (though the option to download a PDF is still available). A Printable Resources section has also been added along the right side of the page for easy download access to common print materials. 

Some documents found in the Unit Guide have changed names or have been separated into two documents: 

•   “Unit Map” and “Standards at a Glance” are now two separate sections 

•   “Managing the Unit” is now called “Getting Ready to Teach” 

•   “Lesson Summaries” is now called “Lesson Overview Compilation” 

•   “On-the-Fly Assessments” is now called “Embedded Formative Assessments”

Many of the materials found in the Unit Guide have been revised. You can access the latest version by redownloading each PDF on its own or by downloading the entire unit’s Teacher’s Guide as a PDF file. 

We have improved the design of the lesson map to make it easier for teachers to locate activities while teaching or planning for a lesson. 

Printable lesson guides feature a new, improved design and include the same content as the digital version, such as teacher supports, possible responses, and On-the-Fly Assessments. 

To improve the teaching experience, we have added a projection mode that allows teachers to project and flip through the slides for a given lesson without revealing the Instructional Guide to students. 

The Instructional Guide has been redesigned to be more clearly organized and to ensure that teachers are able to quickly and easily find what they are looking for while planning to teach. The teacher view of lesson activities has also been updated with better labeling, icons, and color-coding.

The Amplify Science Program Guide details information about the program, including its authorship, development, themes, and more. It serves as a resource for finding out more about the program’s structure, components, supports, how it meets standards, and flexibility.

Rubrics for scoring end-of-unit performance tasks were revised based on teacher feedback. Rubrics now articulate what counts as level 1, 2, etc., to help teachers review and score student work

New differentiation strategies are now available in the lesson-level differentiation briefs, supporting teachers in making necessary adaptations to the lesson to ensure that all students are able to engage with the curriculum.

Student books are available in a digital library, giving teachers the ability to project to students easily and access the books from any supported device.

New phenomenon statements have been added to the lesson overviews on the curriculum website, clearly labeling and describing the anchor phenomenon and other types of phenomena explored throughout each unit.

New information about the Next Generation Science Standards is available to be shared with parents. This explains how students engage with three-dimensional learning to figure out real-world problems throughout each unit, and can be accessed from the Printable Resources section at the unit level.

Color-coded 3-D Statements are available in K–5 units, offering a clear overview of how instruction supports three-dimensional learning. These can be viewed in both the lesson briefs and at the unit level.

A new, summative “3-D Investigation Assessment with Scoring Guidance” activity has been added to each grade level. Embedded in one unit in each grade level, these assessments provide students with an open-ended opportunity to show what they’ve learned by developing a scientific investigation from scratch. The 3-D Investigation Assessments can be found in the following units:

•   Grade K: Sunlight and Weather, Lesson 4.1, Activities 3 and 4
•   Grade 1: Light and Sound, Lesson 4.1, Activity 3
•   Grade 2: Plant and Animal Relationships, Lessons 4.2 and 4.3
•   Grade 3: Balancing Forces, Lesson 5.1, Activity 3
•   Grade 4: Vision and Light, Lessons 5.1 and 5.2
•   Grade 5: Patterns of Earth and Sky, Lessons 4.2 and 4.3

Developed by Amplify*, these assessments are delivered four times per year to give teachers insight into how students are progressing toward mastery of the standards ahead of high-stakes, end-of-year assessments. They can be accessed as PDF files or integrated into QTI-compatible assessment platforms by school or district IT teams.

*The Amplify NGSS Benchmark Assessments were authored by Amplify and were not developed as part of the Amplify Science program or created by the Lawrence Hall of Science.

Easy-to-identify labeling for Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCIs), Crosscutting Concepts (CCCs), and Science and Engineering Practices (SEPs) has been added to assessment opportunities to help teachers connect formative and summative assessments to specific NGSS dimensions.

The Program Guide contains a suite of resources to plan, gather, annotate, and score portfolio assessments. The portfolio assessment process is designed to enable students to survey and reflect on the work they have done over a year, and for the teacher to look at growth across a year’s worth of learning. To support this effort, student- and teacher-facing rubrics are also provided.
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Additional opportunities for student-generated questions have been added throughout the curriculum to help students practice asking questions like scientists.

Teachers and students can utilize multi-language glossaries, with all unit vocabulary translated into ten languages. The glossaries are available through the printable resources section of the Unit Guide as a downloadable PDF.

Several activities were revised to become more student-directed, specifically in the Light and Sound and Inheritance and Traits units, based on teacher feedback. For example, in the Light and Sound unit (grade 1), students now set up their own ways of investigating potential sound sources, rather than conducting a test suggested by the teacher. In the Inheritance and Traits unit (grade 3), students design their own investigations to answer the question of whether the environment can influence traits that are inherited.

Two units have been noticeably revised. The third-grade Balancing Forces unit has been significantly revised based on teacher feedback to allow for more open-ended and student-driven modeling and questioning experiences and to include more explicit use of crosscutting concepts. Additionally, the unit’s original Chapter 1 has been split into two separate Chapters, one on touching forces and the other on magnetic force, making the unit’s learning progression easier to follow. The fifth-grade Modeling Matter unit has been adjusted from two chapters to three, with the addition of new content and minor adjustments to the unit’s Critical Juncture assessments. The following tables explain the changes in more detail. To take advantage of the improvements to these units please redownload all materials.

To take advantage of the most up-to-date version of the curriculum we suggest teaching directly from the curriculum website. If you plan to teach offline and have printed/saved versions of the curriculum from the previous year, we have provided recommendations for which materials you should re-download and print to ensure you benefit from changes that impact the content you are teaching.

This list does not include changes that do not directly impact your use of the curriculum in the classroom (i.e. typo fixes, font changes, etc.)

We suggest re-downloading the following new and revised projections, copymasters and investigation notebook pages for the units you teach. In addition, we suggest re-downloading all materials across the curriculum for the following three categories.

•   Print Materials (8.5” x 11”)

•   Print Materials (11” x 17”)

•   all assessments and rubrics throughout the unit

These materials can be easily downloaded from the Unit Guide or the Digital Resources section in each lesson.

For more information, please contact scihelp@amplify.com