Monte Vista School District
Science Curriculum Guide
​​Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge
- Carl Sagan

Background Information

• ​Purpose
• Process Overview​

Parent Resources

• NGSS Overview
• ​What's in the Standards?
• Scope and Sequence by Grade​

Staff Resources

• NGSS Overview
• ​Scope and Sequence by Grade
• ​​Curriculum Unit Guides​
• Common Language for Scientific Methodology
• ​Read the Standards
• The NSTA Quick-Reference Guide to the NGSS K-12 (Distributed to each science teacher)

Intro to the NGSS (video)

More About the NGSS

How to Read the Next Generation Science Standards This video explains how the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are structured and describes the different components of the organizational tables that the standards are arranged in. 

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How Practices Change
A big shift for students and teachers in implementing the NGSS is the focus on the eight science and engineering practices. Students are not only responsible for knowing ideas; they are also responsible for engaging in practices that use the ideas in authentic ways.

NGSS: Core Ideas and Cross-Cutting Concepts
The Framework and the NGSS define big ideas that have explanatory power for making connections among those ideas. Instead of memorizing facts, formulas, and procedures, the NGSS emphasize the usefulness of ideas in explaining phenomena, and especially in making sense of an unfamiliar phenomenon.

Planning and Carrying out Investigations: What NGSS Looks Like in the Classroom
Observing evidence is the theme of this video as high school teacher Kristin Mayer leads students in a lesson focused on collecting evidence that can be used to evaluate competing models of the nature of matter.