Celebrate 100’s day with a bit of technology. These free online tools allow students extra enrichment when celebrating the 100th day of school.
3D pens are an easy way to create a 3D object. You can design from scratch or use a template. The pens work like a glue gun, except that they use the same filament in a 3D printer. The objects that the students create can be used in project based learning projects.
Unit Summary
This unit on thermal energy transfer begins with students testing whether a new plastic cup sold by a store keeps a drink colder for longer compared to the regular plastic cup that comes free with the drink. Students find that the drink in the regular cup warms up more than the drink in the special cup. This prompts students to identify features of the cups that are different, such as the lid, walls, and hole for the straw, that might explain why one drink warms up more than the other.
Students investigate the different cup features they conjecture are important to explaining the phenomenon, starting with the lid. They model how matter can enter or exit the cup via evaporation However, they find that in a completely closed system, the liquid inside the cup still changes temperature. This motivates the need to trace the transfer of energy into the drink as it warms up. Through a series of lab investigations and simulations, students find that there are two ways to transfer energy into the drink: (1) the absorption of light and (2) thermal energy from the warmer air around the drink. They are then challenged to design their own drink container that can perform as well as the store-bought container, following a set of design criteria and constraints.
This unit builds toward the following NGSS Performance Expectations (PEs) as described in the OpenSciEd Scope & Sequence: MS-PS1-4*, MS-PS3-3, MS-PS3-4, MS-PS3-5, MS-PS4-2*, MS-ETS1-4. The OpenSciEd units are designed for hands-on learning and therefore materials are necessary to teach the unit. These materials can be purchased as science kits or assembled using the kit material list.
The goals of OpenSciEd are to ensure any science teacher, anywhere, can access and download freely available, high quality, locally adaptable full-course materials. REMOTE LEARNING GUIDE FOR THIS UNIT NOW AVAILABLE!
This unit on weather, climate, and water cycling is broken into four separate lesson sets. In the first two lesson sets, students explain small-scale storms. In the third and fourth lesson sets, students explain mesoscale weather systems and climate-level patterns of precipitation. Each of these two parts of the unit is grounded in a different anchoring phenomenon.
To pique students’ curiosity and anchor the learning for the unit in the visible and concrete, students start with an experience of observing and analyzing a bath bomb as it fizzes and eventually disappears in the water. Their observations and questions about what is going on drive learning that digs into a series of related phenomena as students iterate and improve their models depicting what happens during chemical reactions. By the end of the unit, students have a firm grasp on how to model simple molecules, know what to look for to determine if chemical reactions have occurred, and apply their knowledge to chemical reactions to show how mass is conserved when atoms are rearranged.
Unit Summary
This unit on metabolic reactions in the human body starts out with students exploring a real case study of a middle-school girl named M’Kenna, who reported some alarming symptoms to her doctor. Her symptoms included an inability to concentrate, headaches, stomach issues when she eats, and a lack of energy for everyday activities and sports that she used to play regularly. She also reported noticeable weight loss over the past few months, in spite of consuming what appeared to be a healthy diet. Her case sparks questions and ideas for investigations around trying to figure out which pathways and processes in M’Kenna’s body might be functioning differently than a healthy system and why.
Students investigate data specific to M’Kenna’s case in the form of doctor’s notes, endoscopy images and reports, growth charts, and micrographs. They also draw from their results from laboratory experiments on the chemical changes involving the processing of food and from digital interactives to explore how food is transported, transformed, stored, and used across different body systems in all people. Through this work of figuring out what is causing M’Kenna’s symptoms, the class discovers what happens to the food we eat after it enters our bodies and how M’Kenna’s different symptoms are connected.
This unit builds towards the following NGSS Performance Expectations (PEs) as described in the OpenSciEd Scope & Sequence: MS-LS1-3, MS-LS1-5, MS-LS1-7, MS-PS1-1, MS-PS1-2. The OpenSciEd units are designed for hands-on learning, and therefore materials are necessary to teach the unit. These materials can be purchased as science kits or assembled using the kit material list.
Additional Unit InformationNext Generation Science Standards Addressed in this UnitPerformance ExpectationsThis unit builds toward the following NGSS Performance Expectations (PEs):
Students figure out that they can trace all food back to plants, including processed and synthetic food. They obtain and communicate information to explain how matter gets from living things that have died back into the system through processes done by decomposers. Students finally explain that the pieces of their food are constantly recycled between living and nonliving parts of a system.
This is an online module created for the 3rd Grade of the Junior High School. The topic of the lesson is the "7 Wonders of the World", and its main emphasis is placed on the Listening comprehension skills practice.
Oh, no! I’ve dropped my phone! Most of us have experienced the panic of watching our phones slip out of our hands and fall to the floor. We’ve experienced the relief of picking up an undamaged phone and the frustration of the shattered screen. This common experience anchors learning in the Contact Forces unit as students explore a variety of phenomena to figure out, “Why do things sometimes get damaged when they hit each other?”
Student questions about the factors that result in a shattered cell phone screen lead them to investigate what is really happening to any object during a collision. They make their thinking visible with free-body diagrams, mathematical models, and system models to explain the effects of relative forces, mass, speed, and energy in collisions. Students then use what they have learned about collisions to engineer something that will protect a fragile object from damage in a collision. They investigate which materials to use, gather design input from stakeholders to refine the criteria and constraints, develop micro and macro models of how their solution is working, and optimize their solution based on data from investigations. Finally, students apply what they have learned from the investigation and design to a related design problem.
Unit Summary
In this unit, students develop ideas related to how sounds are produced, how they travel through media, and how they affect objects at a distance. Their investigations are motivated by trying to account for a perplexing anchoring phenomenon — a truck is playing loud music in a parking lot and the windows of a building across the parking lot visibly shake in response to the music.
They make observations of sound sources to revisit the K–5 idea that objects vibrate when they make sounds. They figure out that patterns of differences in those vibrations are tied to differences in characteristics of the sounds being made. They gather data on how objects vibrate when making different sounds to characterize how a vibrating object’s motion is tied to the loudness and pitch of the sounds they make. Students also conduct experiments to support the idea that sound needs matter to travel through, and they will use models and simulations to explain how sound travels through matter at the particle level.
This unit builds toward the following NGSS Performance Expectations (PEs) as described in the OpenSciEd Scope & Sequence: MS-PS4-1, MS-PS4-2. The OpenSciEd units are designed for hands-on learning and therefore materials are necessary to teach the unit. These materials can be purchased as science kits or assembled using the kit material list.
This Internet fact finding activity is as easy A-B-C! Students will get an introduction to safe search engines, including MeL, (Michigan e-Library.org), to find ways to do a basic online search safely for information by simply using the letters of the alphabet.
Students go on a hunt to find a word for each letter of the alphabet from a free online picture dictionary.
Description: Students play with an AI that can react to their movement, and choreograph something that uses this tool. They can show off their choreography to the rest of the class
Skills/knowledge you'll gain: Movement, collaboration
Length: 1-4 hours
Curriculum aligns to:
- NGSS Engineering standards
- ISTE standards
- Common Core ELA/Literacy standards
- Also maps to CSTA standards
Description: AI can create realistic-looking images and videos that were never actually filmed or taken as a photo. These images and videos are called deepfakes. This is a quick lesson requiring no background where students learn about deepfakes, as well as ways to verify information that they see
Skills/knowledge you'll gain: Critical thinking
Length: 1 hour
Curriculum aligns to:
- NGSS Engineering standards
- ISTE standards
- Common Core ELA/Literacy standards
- Also maps to CSTA standards
Description: A quick and fun way to become familiar with some core ideas of modern AI while playing with Google Quick, Draw
Skills/knowledge you'll gain: Understanding of what AI is, privacy and bias concerns
Length: 1 hour
Curriculum aligns to:
- NGSS Engineering standards
- ISTE standards
- Common Core ELA/Literacy standards
- Also maps to CSTA standards
Description: An interactive deep dive into the sort of ethical concerns that companies creating AI based systems should consider. Students explore these ideas through role-playing running their own companies and making ethical decisions for those companies
Skills/knowledge you'll gain: Human-centered design, ethics
Length: 10 hours
Curriculum aligns to:
- NGSS Engineering standards
- ISTE standards
- Common Core ELA/Literacy standards
- Also maps to CSTA standards
Description: A short deep dive into how facial recognition technology is used, some biases it has, and some ways companies, individuals, and the law are fighting against its use in surveillance
Skills/knowledge you'll gain: Ethics
Length: 1 hour
Curriculum aligns to:
- NGSS Engineering standards
- ISTE standards
- Common Core ELA/Literacy standards
- Also maps to CSTA standards
Description: Learn how conservationists use AI image recognition to save time identifying how and where to protect endangered species. Build your own species-identifying AI system
Skills/knowledge you'll gain: Conservation
Length: 1-2 hours
Curriculum aligns to:
- NGSS Engineering standards
- ISTE standards
- Common Core ELA/Literacy standards
- Also maps to CSTA standards
AP Lit Comp AP Lit Comp Alienation Disaffection Estrangement. Alienation Disaffection and Estrangement. Alienation Disaffection and Estrangement Background to Kate Chopin Reading the novel After reading the novel Kate Chopins Other Work The Unknown Citizen by WH Auden Connectives Lesson Module Wrapup
AP Lit Comp AP Lit Comp Allusion Symbol. Allusion and Symbols. Allusion and Symbols Lesson 1 Common Biblical and Mythological Allusions and Dictionary of Symbolism Lesson 2 To His Coy Mistress Lesson 3 Dantes Inferno Canto 1 Lesson 4 Dantes Inferno Cantos 234 continued Lesson 5 Allusions in hypertext version of T S Eliots poem The Hollow Men Module Wrapup