Making your own science lessons in Stile

Sand, shells and seaweed were pretty common in my Grade 4 classroom. We grew up near the ocean, so Mrs. Guthrie would create these awesome worksheets and use props from the local marine environment to help us understand everything from English to science. (She would also weave in her beloved Collingwood Football Club captained by Nathan Buckley and even taught us the club song, but that's another story.)

With the benefit of working with teachers across the country, I now realize just how much time and effort she put into crafting those resources. It was her own time, and she did it because she loved it.

We created Stile to be the ultimate sidekick to all science teachers. That means providing you with rigorous, relevant ready-to-use lessons. For those of you like Mrs. Guthrie who find real joy in crafting your own resources, or if creating resources is a priority for your department, Stile has the best possible building blocks for you to do so.

The curated building blocks

Stile’s resources fit together as a complete scope and sequence to cover your curriculum. But, they’re composed of fully editable building blocks like videos, simulations and questions that can be rearranged, modified and used in entirely new contexts to craft your very own resources.

Videos: the exclusive collection

We have over 400 high-quality, scientific rigorous videos in our collection. Our team of science writers have truly scoured the internet to find the absolute best videos to explain scientific concepts at the right level for your students. They've developed specific requirements for videos because they've run into many of the same issues I'm sure you have - videos pitched too high, too low-quality or covering aspects that aren't relevant.

Some of the videos in Stile are licensed from private collections meaning that they've met our writers' requirements (many of whom are teachers themselves). These videos are embedded into our lessons so, even if they're no longer available on YouTube, you'll still have access to them in our lessons.

On many occasions, we simply haven't found videos that meet these standards. When this happens, our writers team up with our illustrators and videographers to create our own explainer videos like the 'Trends in the Periodic Table — Reactivity!' below to perfectly cover the concept for the intended students. This means that you have access to a special collection of curriculum-aligned science videos that only live on Stile.

Simulations and interactives: the complete collection

We have 89 simulations and interactives in our collection that have been carefully curated to meaningfully improve learning. Similarly to videos, highly-quality simulations and interactives that are pitched at the right level for your students are hard to find. Again, our team first explore existing simulations and interactives that will enhance your students' understanding of complex and inaccessible concepts at the right level for them. If we can't find any, our science writers collaborate with our software engineers to build their own powerful simulation that comprehensively covers the concept.

The 'Food Delivery' simulation from our Kinematics unit is a fantastic example of this. Through manipulating the food delivery truck and drawing the graphs, students develop an intuitive understanding of the relationship between distance, speed and time. As a side note, I've seen some trials of the new simulation we're building for our upcoming Evolution unit, it looks epic!

Questions

Across the Stile collection, there are over 6,500 questions, including formative questions, multiple-choice questions and open-ended investigations. These questions are painstakingly crafted to promote learning, identify misconceptions and elicit understanding of a key concept at the right level for your students. Our writers carefully create the 'distractor' answers in our multiple-choice questions to meaningfully uncover common misconceptions, and ensure that our answers aren't easily "Google-able".

For example, the images below are taken from our 'Day and Night' lesson in Our Place in Space. Questions in the lesson, including those below, are designed to identify misconceptions about the Moon and help students explain why the Moon does not cause night.

Ideas for class discussion

With our lessons, you don't just get rigorous science content, videos, questions and interactives, you also get additional teaching resources from science and teaching experts. In every lesson, our science writers leave you little notes called 'teaching notes' to support you in delivering high-quality science lessons. These detailed teaching notes contain additional background information, extra opportunities for class discussion, and tips on specific teaching approaches to support you in tailoring the lesson to suit your teaching style and students' needs.

For example, the 'discussion opportunity' featured below is taken from our Tides lesson and outlines points that you can bring up to elicit further discussion on what causes tidal changes and uncover any misconceptions.

Intuitive tools

With these building blocks and our intuitive editing tools, you can easily take a lesson we’ve crafted and localise it to capture your students’ interest. Videos, simulations, interactives and questions can be copied and pasted within and across lessons, and then you can use the panel of editing tools to add any finishing touches.

Same concepts, different context.

We recently did this ourselves. Last year, we wrote a lesson to support our students in understanding the devastating Australian bushfires. Using local Australian examples and data, the lesson delves into the impact of the bushfires, the cause of fires, and the impact of climate change.

Unfortunately, California saw similarly devastating wildfires earlier this year. To support our US teachers and students, we adapted our bushfires lesson. We kept the relevant sections on the science of fire and the impact of climate the same, but updated the context. We wrote about California instead of Australia, wildfires instead of bushfires, coyotes and bears instead of koalas and snakes, and added information about controlled burning by Native Americans and research by a PhD student from UC Berkeley.

We kept the core concepts the same, but adapted the lesson with local examples to suit the needs of our US students and help them further engage with the topic.

Share your creations

Each school has its own library in Stile. This means you can collaborate with other teachers and create a curriculum for your school in Stile. You tackle certain year levels individually or team up! We also know that some schools work closely together, so we’ve even set up local school networks to share resources across schools.

The best of both worlds.

If you love creating your own custom, curriculum-aligned science learning resources for your students, Stile is hands-down the best tool to do so. Your creations will be powered by Stile's high-quality building blocks. It’s sort of like you have your own personal staff of teachers, writers, illustrators, videographers, and engineers on hand to build the ultimate lessons!