Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

ALBERT EINSTEIN 

  

Science

Our Middle School Science program embraces three overarching themes: systems, cycles, and structure/function relationship

The Middle School science experience delivers essential content while emphasizing the connections between scientific disciplines, introducing and developing skills, promoting thought in an integrated capacity, and presenting the world as a connected system.

At each grade level, students explore topics of Physical, Earth and Life Sciences and their real world applications. Students discover science through student-centered, hands-on and project-based activities. Middle School science is designed to introduce, develop, and reinforce scientific-specific skills. Our teachers guide students in applying these skills through inquiry-based learning involving increasingly complex and age-appropriate content.

Skills that have been introduced in our Lower School program are practiced and refined throughout the course of their Middle School science courses.

  • Observing: identifying properties, structures, etc. through the use of senses

  • Classifying: grouping, matching, and comparing by commonality

  • Identifying: describing and interpreting sensory and qualitative aspects of learning

  • Questioning: asking pertinent questions regarding scientific experiences

  • Measuring: finding quantitative differences, to estimate, calculate, etc. in metric units

  • Recording: ability to collect, record, and tabulate data meaningfully

  • Predicting: ability to guess outcomes on basis of previous experiences

  • Formulating Model: representing cognitive data graphically

  • Formulating a Hypothesis: to predict and generalize from experiences/data; to make an educated assumption as to the possible outcomes of an experiment

  • Interpreting: analyzing data (similarities, dissimilarities, cause/effect)

  • Designing Investigations: controlling and identifying variables, recording and interpreting data, summarizing data, graphing data

  • Manipulating Variables: to identify and selectively change experimental conditions such as time, intervals, and temperature

  • Handling Lab Equipment: to know the purpose for the manner of using lab resources and equipment for the purpose of experimentation

  • Communication: effectively relating experiences, information, and procedures clearly. Expressing ideas to group members, other members of the community, and outside of the community.

  • Researching: seeking additional credible information, sources, conditions, and events through a variety of media (examples: online resources, book, magazines, etc.)

  • Digital Citizenship: to responsibly collaborate online and properly cite sources.

  • Interdisciplinary Skills: to be able to identify those areas of science which are interrelated to other disciplines such as math, English, history, and Judaic Studies. 

xSTREAM Lab  - Our state-of-the-art xSTREAM Lab takes Science, Technology, Robotics, Engineering, Arts, and Math to the next level! Students participate in hands-on conceptual learning that brings hard-to-learn concepts to life.