Science for success

Curriculum by Karen J Hofer

Let me commence by saying I knew science was a vast topic! I was certain a six-week class couldnt begin to cover everything a GED student would need to pass the science test. With that said, I based the curriculum on Science for the GED Test from New Readers Press copyright 2015, ISBN: 978-1-56420-755-5. (Five or more copies are $11.20 each.) In the forward of the text, it states that the book will help students review their science knowledge. Quoting William Shakespeare, Theres the rub! Most of my students have little science knowledge. So reviewing would be quite inadequate.

My classes are six weeks long and are six hours of seat time per week for a total of thirty-six hours. My students and I covered lesson 1, Organization of Life: Cell Theory, in four hours! So I needed a new plan after day one. Now I plan to cover life science that makes up forty percent of the GED science questions in a six-week course, followed by six weeks of physical science that also makes up forty percent of the test and six weeks of earth and space science that fills the remaining twenty percent. I hope in the final six weeks to have more science related writing practice. As I get further in to this process, that plan could change a little too. Who knows!

Now, I must say I am very jealous of the K-12 teachers of science.   Endeavoring to engage K-12 students for thirty-three years in Language Arts lessons was never easy. I have not found many Internet sites that really made learning English fun. But science has such a wealth of curriculum on the Internet that deciding what to use and what to discard was a novel problem. Some of sites I looked at were not great for adult learners; however, the overwhelming majority was wonderful. I used a great deal of video to help with understanding of complicated topics, and I hope my students truly learned a small portion of the science curriculum needed for their GED test every day. 

I have been piloting the lessons with my students and need to tweak a few things before I post the lessons on this site for any of you who wish to use them. I plan to do that soon after Summer Summit.

Thank you, SDALL, for your support of this endeavor. Without the grant you awarded, I would not have been able to find the time to work on a project of this scope.