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Students use potatoes to light an LED clock (or light bulb) as they learn how a battery works in a simple circuit and how chemical energy changes to electrical energy. As they learn more about electrical energy, they better understand the concepts of voltage, current and resistance. I chose this because I never did this in school! This really seems like an exciting and engaging lesson/activity. This lesson could be done in separate parts, with the first part being lecture based (learning about electricity) and the second part being the activity with the potato. I like how this resource has follow-up questions at the end of the lesson.

This website is a teaching resource providing lesson plans, worksheets, and activities for upper elementary and middle school science teachers. All resources on this site are copyright protected but are free to distribute to students in the classroom. Included are links to other websites offering lesson plans, worksheets and activities. Access to literally hundreds of thousands of teaching materials. Broken down into four major categories of life, space, earth and physical sciences.

A lot of worksheets and crossword puzzles related to science content. A few lessons, but my favorite is the collection of different styles of periodic tables (black and white, color, etc.) available for downloading.

The Saint Louis Zoo provides a number of school programs, tours, and lessons for all age groups that deal with the themes of ecology, classification, conservation, and adaptation. There are even overnight programs dealing with these subjects, as well as outreach programs. Each theme has "sub-themes" that become more in depth and involved depending on the grade level of the students. (Diigo would not let me bookmark this link to the School Programs Table: http://www.stlzoo.org/files/7013/1350/2181/ProgramsandTours10.pdf). Costs vary depending on what program you wish to go on. I selected this resource because the Saint Louis Zoo is an excellent educational tool that is located so close to the area, and I feel that it should be utilized. This is valuable to me because I plan on using the Saint Louis Zoo as a field trip location and learning tool for my students. Knowing that there are scheduled programs that are challenging enough for my high school students is an excellent opportunity that I plan to use in the future. 

The Zoo Education Department offers programs designed to help students of all ages and abilities learn through experience, involvement and discovery. Programs may include live animals, biofacts, activities, demonstrations and/or discussions. If your class participates often in our programs, you may see the same animal(s) more than once. This is a great opportunity to get involved in St. Louis with the zoo. Teachers can find ways to use their classroom lessons and progress them with a field trip to the zoo.

This field trip opportunity would go great after a science lesson on renewable and nonrenewable resources/ a rain forest activity. Students would walk through the zoo focusing on different climates each animal lives in, what each animal eats, etc. The zoo provides class education programs that will meet the needs ( to their best ability) to provide animals that live in the specific area you are covering. "Programs may include live animals, bio facts, activities, demonstrations and/or discussions" (St. Louis Zoo). The zoo programs also provides four different areas of focus: adaptations, classification, conservation, and ecology.

After having a lesson on plants, this activity would be a great way for students to learn how to grow plants and also learn about the kinds of things that promote growth (warmth, sunlight, water, soil). Their activities involve learning about how seeds and plants grow and participating in a simple, in-class gardening project. I would provide plastic cups, soil, seeds, and water for each individual student and allow them to plant their own seed. This would be a great way for my students to see first hand what plants need to grow, and for them to learn how to records their observations of their plants.

After having a lesson on plants, this activity would be a great way for students to learn how to grow plants and also learn about the kinds of things that promote growth (warmth, sunlight, water, soil). Their activities involve learning about how seeds and plants grow and participating in a simple, in-class gardening project. I would provide plastic cups, soil, seeds, and water for each individual student and allow them to plant their own seed. This would be a great way for my students to see first hand what plants need to grow, and for them to learn how to records their observations of their plants.

This lesson helps the students understand and explore what technology is and how it's so much more than "computers." It will also give them the chance to study the history throughout America's past time. I think this lesson would be awesome to have a history tie-in simply because they can possibly make a timeline as a class, each student receiving an item and having to research the inventor and how it changed how people operated certain things. i.e. light bulb, electricity, cars, computers, phones, etc. They will use computers and tablets for their research. This way they're using technology to learn about technology.

This lesson shows the process of the water cycle. Water is placed in a small cup in the corner of a plastic zip lock bag. With a marker, show the stages of a water cycle in a circular direction. Place the bag on the window so that the sun causes the water to heat, thus starting the water cycle. I thought this would be a good activity to lead into a lesson on water accumulation, condensation, precipitation and evaporation. If a teacher was fortunate enough to live close to a local newscast, they could have a meteorologist come to talk to the class one day during the lesson on the water cycle.

This lesson involves using balloons to explain the difference between a solid, liquid, and gas. Before beginning the lesson, the teacher needs to have three identical balloons--one filled with a gas, one filled with a liquid, and one filled with a solid. Students would then be allowed to explore and compare certain traits of the different balloons such as weight, texture, and fragility. After exploring these many differences with students, the teacher could then explain to them the properties of a solid, a liquid, and a gas. This activity caught my attention because it was a cheap, easy, hands-on way for students to actively explore the differences between a solid, liquid, and gas. I would use this activity as a catchy introduction to a lesson on matter. (Although the creator of this activity used it for his/her preschool-aged children, I believe that it can be a great tool for the elementary classroom as well.)

This is multiple lesson plans that are combined to make a unit all about the Sun. Within this unit, many different experiments and activities are combined to make students understand the sun and all of its jobs. One great activity I really enjoyed was the shadow sun. Students would draw shadows of partners at different times during the day. The students would then discuss the activity and hopefully understand the movement of the sun from the different shadows. Along with this activity many more are included to help the overall lesson of the sun become instilled in the students.

This is a PDF of a science lesson that includes lessons on sound , light., and energy. It includes objectives and instructions for the students. I think this is a great example of a lesson that will be great for students in class to learn about energy and how it is produced. I would use this site as a resource for teaching mu students about energy.

This video is SO COOL! This would be a great start into a lesson on gravity. It starts with some prior knowledge that students should have. Then it goes into teaching about gravity with the example of an apple falling from the tree. To keep students accountable, I would have them write down words that they may not understand or have them write a short paragraph on what they learned about gravity after this video. If they write down words they don't know, we could go through them as a class before getting in depth to our gravity lesson which could include more videos or an activity later on.

This is sort of a short game, but I feel that you could do it as a class or in learning centers after you had taught the lesson. This online game will get students to realize how much food, water, sleep and exercise you need to stay healthy. It also asks question such as "what will happen if he doesn't get enough water". That is probably when I will have the students answer those questions in their notebooks as an assessment of what they had learned from the lesson prior to this activity. I enjoyed playing this game and fighting to keep Ben healthy.

This is a great lesson on various visual illusions used to engage and intrigue students, all raising the question "Why is this an illusion?" With interest piqued, students are engaged to answer this question about the T-illusion, proposing hypotheses to explain what makes it an illusion, then designing simple experiments to test those hypotheses. This is extended to a look at natural illusions, and how science effectively reveals their reality.

The Biology Corner is a site that contains tons of resources for biology teachers. It provides lessons, quizzes, labs, interactive websites, and general science information. This website even breaks down chapters and topics that should be covered in AP Biology, Freshman Level Biology, and Anatomy and Physiology classes. Within these chapters power-point presentations, review guides, reading worksheets, etc. are all provided and are encouraged to be utilized and modified. I selected this resource because I can use many of the resources provided on this website in my own classroom. I also think it will be valuable to compare my own teaching materials and methods to another individual's and modify my own if I feel that they can be improved from what I have seen from this website. 

This site will be extremely useful to the science teacher. Pages include PowerPoint presentations, review guides, reading worksheets, crossword puzzles and any other specific resources used for that chapter or unit within that subject. Especially nice is the owner and keeper of this website is working to integrate Common Core into a large number of the lesson plans, especially Biology. Whereas a lot of website do not actively update and change their content this one seems to do that.

This page follows the textbook, Modern Biology, providing PowerPoint presentations, review sheets, and activities. I selected this resource because this is the text that is used in the class I am observing. This page has helped me create my own presentations and has given me ideas when creating lessons to go along with the topics the class is covering.

I couldn't bookmark the individual activity but the Scale Distances in the Solar System lesson would be great to use in the classroom to demonstrate and give students a visual on the size of our solar system and the distance between our planets.

This site is great! It gives a very cute animated lesson about butterfly life cycles and then allows you to play games to practive what you've learned! This would be great for a kindergarten or early elementary classroom and could be done individually or on a SmartBoard as a class as well.

This is an awesome lesson plan that can connect most students to something that they enjoy watching on TV and playing with - robots! This lesson allows children to understand the basics of robots and how they work, but also give them the chance to make their own robots. In giving them a chance to build their own robots, they would have to ask questions, make observations, and gather information about a situation people want to change to define a simple problem that can be solved through the development of a new or improved object or tool. (K-2-ETS1-1) I would use this whole lesson plan as a fun way to understand what team work actually is and engineering at a younger level.

This seems like an amazing website in which a teacher is able to teach their students about the world on a large scale. It's an interactive site for teachers, and includes many different resources. It includes lesson plans based on grades, which also includes the standard that was used, procedure, objectives, and how the student should apply it. I think I will use this website in the future. It looks to be very helpful.

This is a lesson where the students get to make observation about snails. The students are given a live snail and told to name characteristics and at the end they get to race the snails. I think this activity is a good way to introduce make observations. This is a very simply and directed lesson. The teacher is given specific question so the students know what they are looking for. I think this resource will be fun for students and it will help them develop the skills needed to make good observations about other animals.