Many investigations have procedures and directions written for students to follow.
Without a student guide, the teacher must orchestrate everything the students do. With a student guide, students can become reponsible for organizing their own learning tasks, for collecting and distributing supplies and for following directions on their own and with teammates. The student guide is not a textbook, but a guide to help students learn important science concepts and practice the inquiry skills of science. The authors did not intend for first-grade students to use their student guides totally independently. Rather, we developed the primary guides to model the format and information that students will encounter in subsequent grades, knowing that teachers would need to use guided reading and other strategies to help beginning readers read the words on the page.