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This a second grade lesson plan that helps students learn how to put different animals into their right categories of vertebrates. It has different ways that you can assess the children on how well they learn the lesson. It is an excellent way to show that animals fit into different categories.

This is a 3rd grade lesson series that explains the water series quite well and breaks it down for the students to understand well. Activities are in the lesson to keep the students engaged and help them learn the process better.

This is a great way for you to have students to work together to figure out the velocity of tornadoes and find out what goes into the forming of tornadoes. It is a fun lesson that will have the students engaged and keep them interested on learning about tornadoes.

In this lesson you go over 6 different habitats in the world. The list contains grasslands (or savanna), temperate forest, tropical rain forest, desert, polar ice, tidepools. You separate your class into six groups and assign each group a habitat. Each habitat has its own assigned question that the students need to find the answer to through research of their habitat using a computer. For example the grassland group has to explain why speed is such a good thing for animals who live there, while the temperate forests are going to explain what tree leaves have to do with frozen water available in their climate. When the assignment is done students have to present their work to the class and teach each other what they learned through their own research. The lesson is basically about adaptations and how they come in handy in certain parts of the world but not others. This link also has web links embedded in it to help students look for their answers. I think this is great for a unit on adaptations and habitats. I would have loved to do this in my upper elementary classes. i feel like i would have learned and remembered so much more. It definitely fosters more constructive learning. I don't tell you about adaptations and then ask questions, you are sent to find the info on your own.

To show students the affects of air pressure. Sixth Acquire data through the senses. (3)(B) classify matter and forces, organisms, actions, and events from the environment according to similarities and differences. Show the students a bottle that has a mouth that is too small for an egg to pass through. ______________________ This activity sparked my interest because ever since I was little, I watched a TV sitcom which explored this concept. How can an egg fit into a container with an opening smaller than the egg?! Using heated air at the bottom of the container, the air pressure sucks the egg in. This particular activity attached goes into using a piece of plywood and paper as well to demonstrate the weight of air. One of both of these demonstrations could be used when explaining air pressure to students. This is more of a complex concept, therefore I think this activity would be best suitable for older ages. I would use these demonstrations at the beginning of the unit to make them want to know more!

This site gives you a great lesson plan idea on teaching students about nutrition and what is really in all the food they eat. This is both a science and math lesson because after the students find out how much fat, sugar, etc. is in most of their favorite foods, the concept of energy is brought up to show the students what they need to do to burn all the calories off.

The website is a great resource for any elementary school teacher. It is broken down into sections such as organization, search engines, games, activities, etc. While I obviously didn't look at all 100, the ones I did look at seemed like they had great potential. The organization section seemed especially promising because I struggle with keeping things organized. It has websites similar to diigo to provide you with more ideas and inspiration. I think this will be a great starting point for any new lesson that I decide to try. Picking any of the 100 sites is sure to bring up something helpful. It includes free audiobooks, body maps, worksheets, electronic field-trips, etc.

I found several of the links to be faulty--leading to old sites no longer functioning, or to sites that looked questionable. However, I did also find Climate Zone, which allows you to use a clickable map to select a region of the world, and then a country, for which the site then provides latitude, longitude, and climate information about the location. This would be a good resource for students researching regions of the world or biomes.

This source has a collection of questions and observations students can make while visiting the Botanical Garden. A field trip to the garden is very realistic in the St. Louis area since there is one in the city. The questions could be previewed in class before the day of the trip, so the students are alert and focused on those topics. This is a great lesson to improve the field trip experience and to get students thinking about the fascinating world of plants. Going on a trip like this is great, because many students will not get a chance to see a wide variety of plant life otherwise.

Composting is the oldest form of recycling. It provides an opportunity for students to observe the decomposition process and energy cycle at work; produces a valuable soil supplement; and reduces the amount of organic material requiring a landfill or incineration. This is a neat hands on lesson that can last up to the whole year! The students get to understand the process of composting and will learn that there we can use other methods of eliminating our trash. My favorite part is that they get to physically see what is happening in the soil. I would start this activity towards the beginning of the year. The students can volunteer to bring in items from the materials list to help feel involved in the prep. I would have the students keep a journal about the chances they see when we check on the compost bin.

This is the type of lesson I would do with my students before we take a field trip to the zoo. I would have them describe different animals. Do they have two or four feet, do they fly, and do they prefer cold or warm weather. I would have my students have group discussions and write down our thoughts. After our field trip, we would come back to the thoughts we wrote down and compare them to what we thought. We can then go deeper into the study and find if certain animals are carnivores or herbivores and where animals such as a zebra or giraffe might be found.

This website has a printable journal for the student's to record their observations of a plant. For my lesson plan, I am going to have the students plant seeds and record their growth. This journal is more for first grade than just a plain piece of paper to write on. It additionally has a box in the daily journal pages to draw what the plant looks like. It is perfect for the students to see the changes in the plant day by day as well.

This resource provides a lesson plan that will help students build an understanding of the concepts of sound (vibration, pitch) through participation in a variety of hands-on experiments. By observing, predicting, and analyzing results, students can actively investigate the science of sound. It says the required time is two weeks but I don't think that much time is necessary to spend on this. It has many activities for students to do that are all hands on and even includes an assessment for the students. I chose this because it fits well with my standard- 1-PS4-1: plan and conduct investigations to provide evidence that vibrating materials can make a sound and that sound can make materials vibrate. I would use this resource in my future classroom by having the students break up into groups and each group would have a different activity to complete and write down their observations.

This is a great lesson plan that would help you discuss how volcanoes end up in the shape that they do. The lesson plan would show students why volcanoes only come in certain shapes.

Astronomy facts of the day present by the Saint Louis Science Center is a great way to introduce the topic of Astronomy, as well as, to build my students knowledge of the topic. Not only does this website include facts, but it also includes occurances that happen on that specific day in the sky which students may be able to witness. This resource could be used daily during my planet and constellation lesson plans, in addition to randomly the rest of the year after the students learn about the topic.

Great resource! SO interesting.

The website includes directions for a great kinesthetic approach to teaching constellations. This project consists of star cookies which the students configure into different constellations. I selected this resource to use during my stars lesson plan. After seeing the stars in the distances I feel this project will bring the idea of constellations down to earth.

I was surprised to find this website to be written in French! It would require some calculation to convert the recipe from grams to our more standard measurements, or at least a kitchen scale. This recipe isn't essential to the star shape, though, which could be achieved with regular sugar cookie dough and a small star cutter.I do love the idea of placing the cookies in a pattern and connecting with chalk or crayon to either "create" new constellations (for which students could also write related myths or stories) or review and recreate the existing constellations under study.

This resource shows a video of a women performing a song by using test tubes filled with water to create different pitches. It demonstrates the use of sound and vibrations. It tells you all the materials that you will need, what to do, and what will happen. It also gives you ideas for further activity if you have more time in the class. I chose this resource because I did an activity similar to this in my Methods of Fine Arts class but we used mason jars instead of test tubes, which I believe would be more safe for younger students. Also, the water in each mason jar was a different color and each jar was labeled 1-8. This made it easier when we played a song with the jars. I think this activity would be very fun for students to do because I really enjoyed doing it. You don't have to necessarily follow this lesson plan; you can tweak it to how you want. I would use this resource after teaching my students about vibrations and talking about how sounds change when water levels are different. It goes along with my standard 1-PS4-1: plan and conduct investigations to provide evidence that vibrating materials can make a sound and that sound can make materials vibrate.

This is an interactive site that provides a range of information and resources for students and teachers. The site includes videos, lesson plans, quizzes, games, projects and other resources. I chose this specific topic about animals because it can be used to teach students about the food chain. Students can interact with animals and other living things like plants and learn the process of how the food chain works.

This is a very good site for finding information about a variety of events and subjects in class. This is good for K -6 teachers. It is broken into several topics: Lesson Plans, Professional Development, Technology, Administrators, School Resources, Specialties, and Subject Resources. I could definitely use many of these resources in my own classroom.

The link below takes you directly to the science portion. I found some broken links, but also so great images/diagrams (e.g. the cell) that could be linked into presentations. http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/archives/sciencemachine.shtml

"How do you get your food? How would your eating habits change if you didn't have a microwave? Would it change if you had to grow and prepare all your own food? Why?" I think this is a wonderful idea for a field trip as it would get students involved and excited to learn more about animals and their habitats. A trip to the zoo may seem like a simple class field trip, but many kids have not had the opportunity to go to a zoo and see the many different kinds of animals. I think this would be a great learning experience for students as they are able to observe the animals first-hand and take notes on what they notice about the animals in their habitats.