Professor Tanya Wright co-leads the K-2 development team and leads the literacy integration team for OpenSciEd’s newly-launched K–5 science curriculum
The free, open-access initiative expands access to high-quality science education with integrated literacy instruction nationwide.
OpenSciEd offers integrated materials that are aligned with the national Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and aspects of English Language Arts (ELA) standards.
Marsal School Professor Tanya Wright and MSU Professor Amelia Wenk Gotwals served as members of the OpenSciEd Elementary Development Consortium led by Northwestern University. The curriculum is now online and freely available to educators across the country and around the world.
“These materials focus on children's sensemaking around science phenomena,” says Wright. “Kids are given an interesting science phenomenon to investigate. For example, in a second grade unit, they look at images of plants growing in unusual places (like a plant that spontaneously grew on the top of a building) and then across the unit, they figure out how plants grow in these places.”
Wright and Gotwals began collaborating on this work in 2013, when the NGSS were adopted. At the time, they realized there were overlaps in ELA standards and those that NGSS was going to require. Instead of considering science separately from literacy development, they sought to support teachers by developing curriculum materials and professional development opportunities that would help teachers enact the integrated vision.
In 2014, Wright and Gotwals launched SOLID Start (Science, Oral Language and Literacy Development from the Start of School), a series of K–2 integrated science and literacy lessons, in one Michigan school district. Today, SOLID Start is used across Michigan and the nation. It also served as a model for how to integrate literacy into science instruction with a particular focus on supporting children's oral language development during science, says Wright.
Wright and Gotwals built upon foundational lessons and research stemming from their SOLID Start efforts to develop the OpenSciEd materials. Now, with national distribution and free access, the opportunity to transform students’ learning experience is exponential.
Wright led OpenSciEd’s K–5 Literacy Integration & Text Development team which implemented research-based approaches to integrating literacy and science practices in the curriculum materials and created over 200 texts for children. She also co-led (with Gotwals) the development of OpenSciEd Elementary instructional materials for grades K–2,
In addition, Wright and post-doctoral scholar Amanda Dahl have written an article about using texts during science instruction for elementary teachers that employs examples from the OpenSciEd curriculum. The article was recently published in the journal, The Reading Teacher.
