This portfolio comprises three curriculum pieces designed to develop middle school students’ use of reasoning and logic in the science classroom.   This portfolio is designed to supplement the classic middle school curriculum, introducing students to logic, teaching students to articulate logic, and then asking them to use logic repeatedly through the school year. 

In the introductory lesson, students use logic puzzles to make claims, and then learn to substantiate their claims using the Claim-Evidence-Reasoning format.  As a supplement to this unit, provided are a series of curriculum inserts for use in the 8^th grade physical science classroom.  These inserts are one-page documents that ask students to make and substantiate a claim using the format used above.  The last unit of the series asks students to use their reasoning skills to identify a crystal of unknown substance and then develop a method to regrow that crystal.