Living? Nonliving? Dormant? Dead? Even though teaching living vs. nonliving seems very elementary, you’d be surprised by how often high school students get confused when you throw examples at them. It makes me think of this 90’s “J-E-L-L-O it’s alive!” commercial: But in all seriousness….Teaching characteristics of life is a great way to start off ... Read more
These STEAM activities are perfect for homeschool classes or co-ops. Put science, technology, engineering, and math into hands-on homeschool STEM learning.
If you (or your preschooler) has ever asked the question, "what is blood made of?", you must check out this fun activity to learn about the parts of blood.
50 eco club ideas with FREE check list to engage your community, promote sustainability, and make a lasting impact. Get started now!
Learn about fingerprinting for kids & play detective! Fun ideas for a CSI or spy party or science activity for preschool & elementary ages!
Try this oil spill clean up experiment with your students or kids! This is agreat one for Earth Day or anytime you want to teach about the environment!
Explore biology for kids with science experiments, activities, and worksheets to learn about plants, animals, and human body systems.
Biochemistry and biology don’t have to be boring and dreadful. Over the years I have tried to make teaching the Biochemistry unit more...
This is one lab that you don’t want to miss! It’s easy, the materials are inexpensive (you probably already have them at home), and it ties together multiple concepts. Winner!In this lab, students will analyze a pedigree of a fictitious family. In the introduction, students read that “Jon and Sue Smith” were in a car ... Read more
Cells have more in common across species than students think. Grab these cell worksheets to help visualize the similariites and differences beteween cells.
The purpose of eating food is to obtain the nutrients our bodies need to stay alive and perform all our daily tasks. The process of breaking down food into
Get your free carrying capacity game. Students will learn about carrying capacity and limiting factors.
I posted on Instagram last week pictures of preparing agar for my go-to first week of school lab: testing the 5 second rule. It’s a great lab for back to school because students are super engaged and it’s a good way to review variables and how to set up a controlled experiment. I had a ... Read more
Enjoy teaching plants' parts, structures and functions with these hands-on activities. Your 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students will love them!
Got a gardening guru on your hands? Give them a fun challenge with this fill-in-the-blanks quiz about the parts of a seed!
This is a great unit with my seventh graders. It's easy to start because the kids usually remember something about photosynthesis from elementary school. If not, they already know that plants need sunlight and water. This is not a very long unit. Maybe 2-3 weeks. The goals for this unit are: The students will be able to write the word equations for photosynthesis and respiration Photosynthesis is "sunlight + water + carbon dioxide --> glucose + oxygen." Respiration is "glucose + oxygen --> ATP energy + water + carbon dioxide." The students will identify that photosynthesis occurs in the chloroplast and respiration occurs in the mitochondria. The students will identify that they are reverse/opposite reactions. The students will understand the words "reactant" and "product." The students will use their knowledge of the reactions to answer various questions. Some (not all) of the activities we do for this unit: 1. Acting it out! I have little cut outs from card stock paper (nothing fancy!) and one kid is assigned a role (either a reactant or a product, or the plant). I make up a little narrative and the kids have to listen for their part and come in and "act" it out appropriately. It's just a fun little activity, but it gets the kids up and moving and helps them visualize what's going on. This class actually happened on Halloween this year, which was perfect. None of my kids dressed up for school (sad!) so I told them I had brought their costumes: sunlight, water, carbon dioxide, glucose, oxygen, and a plant. haha. 2. Worksheet practice: Worksheet practice throughout the unit, used in whatever order makes sense for that year and how that group of students is progressing. This is only two of my worksheets. The others ended up as a mix of things from other sources that are not directly mine, so I'm not putting them on here. I know I've got others, but they're probably on my work computer (I'm on my home computer right now). If I find them I'll put them on here, too. (Get the worksheet at the bottom of this page) Worksheet A: Identification WORKSHEET B: Chemical Formulas I use this more for my 8th graders who are working on the periodic table and interpreting chemical formulas. It reinforces what they learned last year and applies their new knowledge to familiar situations. Link for worksheet at the bottom of this page. 3. WALL-E Day! from google image search No, we don't watch the whole movie, although that would be awesome and less planning for me! But there's no time to do that and it would be a waste when a few clips can aid your discussion quite nicely. The kids love this class because we get to watch some of WALL-E and understand that it actually has real science in it! The clips I show (I may or may not show all of them) 1. Opening Scene 2. WALL-E's day at work 3. WALL-E finds a plant 4. WALL-E first date scene (EVE takes the plant) 5. WALL-E in space 6. Human dystopia 7. Directive A113 8. End Credits (I show this so we can talk about what the people are doing and how the earth changes) WORKSHEET FOR WALL-E (link at bottom of page) 4. Yeast Lab: It's hard to tell, but the red balloon is a little bigger. It would be fun to also do a plant lab, but I haven't figured out how to do one of those in our small little country school with limited resources. So yeast lab is how we'll have to do it! The kids love watching the balloons fill up. I use this towards the end of the unit to really push their thinking and application of what they have learned. Deeper level questions like "How can you prove the yeast are doing respiration and not photosynthesis?" (possible answers: we added sugar as a reactant; they're not green, so they don't have chloroplast; etc.) "What is filling up the balloon and how do you know?" (CO2, because it's undergoing respiration). My kids have a harder time with these questions that make them think. It takes more prodding as a teacher to get these SPED kids to that level. We can get there, it just takes longer. LAB WORKSHEET (link at bottom of page) And that's photosynthesis and respiration. We do a lot of group lecture, discussion, and practice. I draw a lot on the board and I have them practice the equations every day. Today was our last day on the unit, but we have two days of review before our cell test (the overall unit), so we'll have some talk on it before the test next week.
Check out these high school teacher ideas for teaching photosynthesis and respiration with animations and hands-on activities
Kids will have a blast learning about cells with this fun, hands...
Build a Heart Model - STEM activity about heart rates and how blood flows through the body. Engineer a functioning model of a beating heart.
Study the respiratory system and determine your lung capacity and what might affect it. Students will calculate and make conclusions.
What does it mean to have asthma? How do healthy lungs function compared to sick lungs? These are the questions my 8-year-old wanted to investigate today. This STEM Respiratory System Investigation was a great discovery of what can stop our lungs from working properly. We compared lungs with asthma to healthy lungs and talked about some other lung infections and how they can affect our bodies.
YouTube science videos teaching human body anatomy to kids kindergarten to high school. Free resource for science, biology and physiology class.
Here's to another Sunday spent planning. The goal for next week is to get a few things planned before the weekend comes! To make this post a little shorter, I am breaking it into two parts. Tomorrow, I will share my reading and writing plans for some Minilesson Magic :) Science: This week, we have our mini-unit on genetics scheduled. Our students need to learn the following objectives: * Explain why organisms differ from or are similar to their parents based on the characterisitcs of the organism. * Give examples of likenesses that are inherited and some that are not. For my student journal pgs, click here (free and in a pdf). Monday: Set up science journals. The label shown above will be pasted into their notebook as a divider for our first unit of study. Complete the "Mice" assessment probe to see what students already think about how traits show up in organisms. After students think about their own explanations, we will use the explanations above to make a bar graph for how they think offspring's fur color is decided. (This assessment probe comes from Page Keeley, Uncovering Student Ideas in Science). Use 1st page of heredity video to explain heredity. Tuesday: Fingerprints Lab (found this gem linked for free online) Wednesday: Observing Human Traits Lab (free from Tamra Young on TPT); explain dominant and recessive traits and draw conclusions about what traits are dominant/recessive for humans based on classroom data) Thursday: Complete active sort around the room for Inherited vs Acquired traits and make flipbook (free materials from Jennifer Findley) Friday: Learn about Punnett Squares with Leprechaun Genetics (free from Making it Teacher on TPT) Other Resources that might be thrown in w/ extra time: Unit Outline from Moore County (includes a smartboard file to guide the mini-unit) Peas in a Pod (Mendelian Genetics) online freebie; Questions to go along with the reading selection included (I made these last year) Heredity (from Brainpop) DNA (from Brainpop) Animated Videos that explain DNA, genes, chromosomes, protein, heredity, and traits Math: This week in math, I will be getting to know my students better as mathematicians. I'm using some of the journal prompts/explorations from my Math Explorations that focuses on factors. (Not only will we learn about decomposing numbers, but students will be forced to use their multiplication facts). Since my Math Explorations are aligned with the mathematical practices, I thought it would be a good way to introduce concepts like communicating in math, perseverance, using multiple methods for showing work, using different strategies, etc. We are also going to continue working on our Summer Slide questions, which we started on Friday. Given time, I will also begin to introduce some of our math stations. For math stations, my team decided that we would have 4 stations this year, MATH SUPERSTARS, CONCEPT FOCUS, ALGEBRAIC, and something computer-based like Moby Max. Morning Meeting: We are going to focus on perseverance all week. We have a county-wide assessment that is designed with all tasks focusing on perseverance, so this fits in nicely with morning meeting. The kiddos may not even realize they are being assessed. Finish Strong Erik Weihenmayer on Oprah (start at 1:21) Hope you enjoyed peeking at my week! Tune in tomorrow for my reading/writing minilesson ideas for the week.
Learn about the brain and create your very own printable brain hemisphere hat perfect for a human body and brain study.
Learn about fingerprinting for kids & play detective! Fun ideas for a CSI or spy party or science activity for preschool & elementary ages!
How the stomach breaks down food: a hands-on demonstration to understand the two ways in which the stomach breaks down food during digestion.
Learning about the Human Body is so much fun. Here are 80+ ways to learn about the human body.
DNA Gene Bracelet for Kids, an easy STEAM Activity using beads to create pattern bracelets. DNA is also a pattern.
planning some of our Science curriculum, I couldn't help but find so many great human body learning activities for kids.
If you want your children to learn more about body organs and their functions, these human body printables for kids are just what you need!
I decided to take on my own challenge of incorporating a STEM activity every day for a week. It turned out to be a huge success where both my students and I had a blast. Here were the various …
Cell diversity game that focuses on eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells and the diversity of those populations. Common cellular structures are used.
What is DNA? Take your child on a learning adventure and dive deep into the world of DNA: the most amazing molecule in the Universe.
It took me all of a few days of parenting twins to recognize that their brains were truly unique to them . It was fascinating (and a bit overwhelming) to see how differently they responded to the same exact circumstances. The debate over nature and nurture won’t be going away anytime soon. It i
Brain Hemisphere Hat This is the “world-famous” Brain Hat. This humble little hat has been distributed around the world (even at some famous science museums) and has been translated in…
