EDSS in Your Classroom Will Trigger a $50 Donation! When you implement the symposium in your classroom, you will automatically generate a $50 donation from African Wildlife Fund (AWF) for habitat conservation. AWF will match participation with funding up to $500,000! Each class will be rewarded with an honorary certificate.
EDSS challenges students to become experts on African elephants by analyzing data and
explaining research to their peers. It includes powerful assessment tools designed to
measure achievement across multiple applied math and science benchmarks.
Celebrate Earth Day! Your participation automatically generates
donations towards conservation of elephants and habitats.
Days 1-2
Warm up with a quick look at general facts and field stories. Students extract pertinent facts and write them in short captions. On Day 2, you kick off student preparation with a sample data set and quick demonstration.
Days 3-6
Working in groups of 2+, students analyze data, enlarge charts, and prepare presentations—guided by questions that include challenging critical-thinking problems. Sixteen data sets are provided at 3 levels of difficulty.
Presentations on Days 5 and 6 should take 5-7 minutes each. The EDSS rubric ensures that students understand grading and makes your job quick and easy.
Day 7
Have a quick class discussion to review data and answer the question, What’s happening to African elephants? Celebrate! Reward students with your honorary Big Gift certificate.
The Earth Day Science Symposium is a three year project to
improve science literacy in middle school classrooms. EDSS materials are provided free
to middle-school classrooms through generous funding from the Toyota USA Foundation.
By supporting the Earth Day Science Symposium, the foundation is working to foster
creativity and inquiry, as well as to improve math and science education in schools
across the nation.
