LAFS.1112.RST.1.3Archived Standard

Purpose: To compare the species diversity of an area with high human impact vs. less human impact.

Students will complete an investigation which will allow them to use the Simpson's diversity index formula to evaluate and compare biodiversity around their school campus. Students will draw conclusions based on their data set.

This activity can has many applicable extensions based on student needs and interests. It also can be easily modified to fit certain time constraints, or physical limitations on varying school campuses.

Resource includes lab sheet which provides instructions for students to complete the investigation, worked example of the Simpson's Index formula, space for students to record their findings at the various investigation sites, as well as apply their data to the formula. Students will also draw conclusions based on their data set.

Type: Lesson Plan

This activity is designed to help students understand the concept of resonance through the application of the wave equation to sounds produced by a singing wine glass.

Type: Lesson Plan

The goal of this lesson plan is for students to be able to conduct mini-experiments that demonstrate what ocean acidification is and how it affects marine organisms. Students will perform mini-experiments and observe diagrams to help generate a definition of what ocean acidification is, why it is occurring, and how humans can reduce their impact.

Type: Lesson Plan

The purpose of this lesson is for students to conduct mini-experiments, demonstrating the physical properties of water. Students will collect data, diagram results, and generate a well-developed paragraph describing the various effects of water pressure and temperature.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students learn and apply vocabulary, notation, concepts, and geometric construction techniques associated with circles and their tangents to a historical real-world scenario, the Mason-Dixon Line, and a hypothetical real-world scenario, the North-South Florida Line.

Type: Lesson Plan

Using inquiry techniques, students, working in groups, are asked to design and conduct experiments to test the Law of Conservation of Energy and the Law of Conservation of Momentum. Upon being provided with textbooks, rulers, measuring tapes, stopwatches, mini-storage containers, golf balls, marbles, rubber balls, steel balls, and pennies, they work cooperatively to implement and revise their hypotheses. With limited guidance from the teacher, students are able to visualize the relationships between mass, velocity, height, gravitational potential energy, kinetic energy, and total energy as well as the relationships between mass, velocity, and momentum.

Type: Lesson Plan

Using inquiry techniques, students, working in groups, are asked to design and conduct an experiment to test Newton's Second Law of Motion. Upon being provided with textbooks, rulers, measuring tapes, mini-storage containers, golf balls, marbles, rubber balls, steel balls, and pennies they work cooperatively to implement and revise their hypotheses. With limited guidance from the teacher, students are able to visualize the direct relationships between force and mass; force and acceleration; and the inverse relationship between mass and acceleration.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students compete with one another to design and build a roller coaster from insulation tubing and tape that will allow a marble to travel from start to finish with the lowest average velocity. In so doing, students learn about differences between distance and displacement, speed and velocity, and potential and kinetic energy. They also examine the Law of Conservation of Energy and concepts related to force and motion.

Type: Lesson Plan

This is a largely self-paced unit for students to learn the basics of Momentum as well as the Law of Conservation of Momentum. Students complete two investigative exercises (one hands-on, the other virtual). They then are directed to read a website (or a textbook could be substituted) and take notes with the teacher"s support as needed. After taking their own notes, students complete a worksheet to practice calculations involving the Law of Conservation of Momentum. At the end of the unit, students take a traditional summative assessment with True/False, multiple-choice, and fill-in-the-blank questions along with a calculations section. Note that this lesson only covers the basics of linear momentum and does not include impulse or angular momentum.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will develop a procedure for selecting car covers to protect the fleet of vehicles used by the Everywhere Sales Corporation. They will use a given data table to consider the attributes of several different brands of car covers, analyze their strengths and weaknesses, and then rank and weight the attributes according to their level of importance. The procedure will be written out in detail and a rationale provided to advise the company which car cover(s) should be used.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson is designed for students who enrolled in an elementary statistics or math for college readiness class who are at the stage of collecting and analyzing data. In their algebra 1 class, they were introduced to statistical topics such as line of best-fit and equation of a line as they relate to real-world meaning.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

The goal of this lesson is that students will be able to conduct mini-experiments that demonstrate how water behaves. Students will perform the experiment, collect the data, diagram results, and generate a definition of the seven properties of water.

Type: Lesson Plan

This is a ray drawing activity to aid students in their understanding of how virtual images are formed by plane mirrors, and how the image size and distance from the mirror compare to those of the object.

Type: Lesson Plan

This activity will explore the connection between wavelength and frequency of colors in the visible light using web sites, hand-spectroscopes, spectral tubes and CSI type investigations.

Type: Lesson Plan

The Corn Conundrum MEA provides students with an agricultural problem in which they must work as a team to develop a procedure to select the best variety of corn to grow under drier conditions predicted by models of global climate change. Students must determine the most important factors that make planting crops sustainable in restricted climate conditions for the client. The main focus of this MEA is manipulating factors relating to plant biology, including transpiration and photosynthesis.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

Every school child learns that the earth-sun distance is 93 million miles. Yet, determining this distance was a formidable challenge to the best scientists and mathematicians of the 18th and 19th centuries. The purpose of this lesson is to use the 2012 Transit of Venus as an opportunity to work through the mathematics to calculate the earth-sun distance. The only tools needed are basic knowledge of geometry, algebra, and trigonometry. The lesson is self-contained in that it includes all the data needed to work through the exercise.

Type: Lesson Plan

The Plants versus Pollutants MEA provides students with an open-ended problem in which they must work as a team to design a procedure to select the best plants to clean up certain toxins. This MEA requires students to formulate a phytoremediation-based solution to a problem involving cleaning of a contaminated land site. Students are provided the context of the problem, a request letter from a client asking them to provide a recommendation, and data relevant to the situation. Students utilize the data to create a defensible model solution to present to the client.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will model molecular motion with everyday materials (shaker bottles) then associate their model/actions to the phase transitions of water while graphing its heat curve from data collected during a structured inquiry lab.

Type: Lesson Plan

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By the end of this module, teachers should be able to:

• Name the key instructional shifts in English Language Arts and Literacy
• Label the College and Career Readiness, also known as CCR, anchor standards for Reading
• Use the language of the Reading Standards for Literacy in Science and Technical Subjects to identify what students should know and be able to do
• Arrange and sequence the Reading Standards for Literacy in Science and Technical Subjects
• Distinguish the changes in rigor as a Reading standard progresses from one grade band to the next

This is Module 1 of 4 in the series, "Literacy across the Content Areas: Reading and Writing to Build Content Knowledge."

Type: Professional Development

With an often unexpected outcome from a simple experiment, students can discover the factors that cause and influence thermohaline circulation in our oceans. In two 45-minute class periods, students complete activities where they observe the melting of ice cubes in saltwater and freshwater, using basic materials: clear plastic cups, ice cubes, water, salt, food coloring, and thermometers. There are no prerequisites for this lesson but it is helpful if students are familiar with the concepts of density and buoyancy as well as the salinity of seawater. It is also helpful if students understand that dissolving salt in water will lower the freezing point of water. There are additional follow up investigations that help students appreciate and understand the importance of the ocean's influence on Earth's climate.

Type: Video/Audio/Animation