The mission of Science4Us is to make elementary science education a success within the reality of today’s educational environment.

Get to know Science4Us!

5 E’s	Activity Overview
Lesson Plans	Student Reports

Science4Us.com is an interactive K-5 standards-based science curriculum in development by VKidz. The strategy is to provide a multimedia foundational skills curriculum, initially for K-2nd grades, that:

1. engages students to learn and to like science
2. increases teachers’ comfort with and commitment to teaching science.

Portions of Science4Us are currently in use in 30 public school classrooms. Science4Us is offering free access to the curriculum to teachers, schools, or districts willing to provide feedback to the curriculum developers. For further information, contact us.

Science4Us Science4Us is teacher-friendly and student-friendly. The curriculum delivery model in the classroom requires no additional professional training for teachers, while offering a variety of learning sequences and possible centers-based explorations as well as whole-class discussions. Science4Us provides students with recursive learning opportunities intended to highlight and correct naïve ideas and/or misconceptions. Students, whether pre-readers or literate, are guided through the multimedia experience at their own pace.

Science4Us builds on the Inquiry 5E Instructional Model of engagement, exploration, explanation, elaboration, and evaluation (Bybee, Taylor & Gardner, 2006). Digital-based game- and simulation-infused curricula provide a powerful approach to the 5Es thanks to animation, video, embedded assessments, grade appropriate reading passages, read-alouds with highlighted text, vocabulary exercises and virtual laboratory experiences.

The Science4Us materials will be available on a modular basis so that teachers can use these resources to support instruction. When used as a complete curriculum, Science4Us teaches the learning progressions systematically and efficiently with opportunities and ideas for real world observation, demonstration, or experiment.

Casual games fit well into today’s busy classrooms and student schedules. These games engage with techniques such as simulations, progression levels, reward sequences, competition, amusing sound effects, appealing graphics, increasing difficulty, appropriate resets when students answer incorrectly, and can be played in three to ten minutes. Likewise, simulations evoke critical higher order thinking skills, while teacher and parent support materials, an effective scope and sequence, a student portfolio and an automated process for reporting student progress and activities, complete the Science4Us learning management system.

Online Science Education for Elementary Schools – In an ideal educational system, each elementary school classroom would have a teacher who is trained and has the materials to lead the students in a hands-on science curriculum allowing the students to experiment, to tinker, and to discover. This is far from today’s reality with teacher training, logistics, classroom management, and other massive challenges preventing most classrooms from taking even baby steps in this direction. However, today’s learners are more-than-ready to learn and to experiment virtually. In many cases, this will lead to hands-on projects. This is the Science4Us vision.

Science4Us will be the first to deliver a complete online, standards-based elementary school multimedia curriculum. Science4Us is implementing research-based best practices and is actively seeking grant support and other relationships with national leading organization such as the National Science Foundation and NSTA. While concept development dates back a number of years, full scale development started in 2010. The first formal classroom testing of Science4Us materials was in the spring of 2011 If you are interested in knowing more or participating, please contact us.