In this interactive lesson, students will apply and extend previous understandings of division to divide unit fractions by whole numbers and whole numbers by unit fractions. They will also interpret the division of a unit fraction by a non-zero whole number, compute such quotients and interpret the division of a whole number by a unit fraction, and compute such quotients.
This media gallery is designed to assist students, teachers, and parents in successfully completing an original composition for the WQED PBS KIDS Writers Contest. These resources can be used with students in grades K-5.
The gallery includes many resources that students could use to draft and refine a narrative.
The focus of this video lesson is writing expressions to represent situations. Students write expressions to represent operations with numbers and with letters standing in for numbers. Students can also choose to represent expressions with tape diagrams (MP5).
Students will watch a video that shows kids camouflaging themselves in order to blend into nature so they can watch wildlife. The kids follow a sequence of steps in order to camouflage themselves. The students will take notes on this process and write a paragraph that conveys the steps in proper order.
Overview
Students watch a video segment, take notes and using a time-order organizational structure, write a paragraph about how to camouflage themselves.
Why is this an important concept?
When learners can take ideas and sort them by order according to time, they can better comprehend the complexity, sequence, and relationships among the ideas. Noting the relationships among ideas leads to the ability to generalize, categorize, sort, evaluate, and understand new information.
Many jobs in the manufacturing industry require writing emails, reports, and updates. The first thing employees should consider when they start to write anything for work is audience and purpose, so they are sure to use the most appropriate language and format. This resource provides instruction and discussion in considering your audience when crafting workplace documents.
Healthcare workers often write reports, charts, and emails. Writing clearly and accurately is critical to patient care and success in the medical field. This resource provides instruction and discussion about the audience, purpose, and functions of workplace documents.
This novice-mid to novice-high Spanish activity encourages students to gather information from heritage speakers about how various holidays are celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Students gather information from the video recordings and compare their findings to celebration practices from within their own culture and eventually plan a party of their own. This full class period activity includes various stages requiring students to work individually, in pairs, and in groups.
This interactive game from WNET Thirteen, “For Crown or Colony?” puts players in the shoes of Nat Wheeler, a printer’s apprentice in 1770 Boston. Players encounter both Patriots and Loyalists, and when rising tensions result in the Boston Massacre, they must choose where their loyalties lie. A brand-new version of this game is now available! Teachers will need to register to play this game. The game can be played in a whole group setting or individually. Teachers can also download a teacher's guide.
In this PhET activity, students will construct series and parallel circuits using available materials. Students will explore how resistors, batteries, and various types of insulators and conductors affect circuits. Students will explore Ohm’s law by determining how resistance affects circuits by utilizing voltmeters, ammeters, and charts to measure voltage and current. Students will prove Kirchhoff’s laws by demonstrating that current is equal on each side of a node and that the sum of voltage differences is 0. This activity can be used to introduce a unit on circuits or to reinforce students’ knowledge of circuits.
In this PhET activity, students will be able to visualize chemical reactions by viewing 3D representations of atoms and molecules. Students will balance chemical equations by adding or taking away certain numbers of molecules to demonstrate that atoms, and therefore mass, are conserved during a chemical reaction. This activity can be used to introduce the law of conservation of mass or to reinforce the skill of balancing equations.
In this PhET Activity, students will explore the relationships between the pressure, volume, temperature, and density of ideal gases. As an extension, students can visualize, using graphs, how the temperature and pressure of a gas impact the speed and kinetic energy of particles. This activity can be used as an exploratory introduction to the behavior of gases, as a digital lab, or to reinforce student knowledge of confined gases.
In this PhET Activity, students will model molecular shapes by creating 3D ball-and-stick images. Students will explore the effects of adding and removing bonds and/or lone pairs of electrons. Students will also utilize models of real molecules to analyze their electron and molecular geometries and bond angles. This activity can be used to introduce molecular shapes or to reinforce student knowledge.
In this PhET Activity, students will generate data from a population of rabbits in different environments. Students will introduce mutations and/or environmental factors that affect rabbits’ traits and adaptations. Students will analyze the generated charts and graphs to evaluate how different traits and adaptations caused the population to change over time due to natural selection. This activity can be used as an introduction to natural selection or as a virtual inquiry lab.
This video resource directly aligns with the associated standard, specifically using frequently occurring affixes to identify word meaning. Multiple examples are given, and the audio explanations are engaging and conversational. This resource could be used with an individual student for additional practice or reteaching, or it could be used by the teacher as a review or even an engagement before a study of affixes. It presents multiple strategies for determining the meaning of an unknown word through the acronym IDEAS.
This lesson is a research-based activity designed for high school students. In this lesson, students will research and investigate a historical landmark case provided by the PBS series, History Detectives. This lesson intends to help students master the practice of conducting a research project. The lesson includes a reproducible, a graphic organizer, and related videos.
This video resource will provide fourth- and fifth-grade students with a strategy to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words using context clues. This video demonstrates using the "IDEAS Method" (Inference, Definition, Example, Antonym, and Synonym) to learn new words. By looking at words around a new word, the lesson activity helps students to understand new vocabulary.
In this series of 5 lessons which map to several 8th-grade science and CTE standards, students first build up a background knowledge of thermal energy transfer, distinguishing heat from temperature, through demonstrations and discrepant events. They then investigate the properties of various materials and their ability to prevent heat transfer through radiation, conduction, or convection. They use this background learning to design a structure (igloo) to keep an ice cube (penguin) from melting in the heat from incandescent bulbs. The emphasis of the investigation is the engineering design process, where the class discusses the results of students’ tests of their designs, and groups have an opportunity to redesign their solutions.
This lesson plan teaches students about lunar phases. Students will manipulate an interactive model of the moon to observe the motion of the moon. They will use the model to observe the motion of the moon and the patterns of lunar phases.
This online calculator calculates the standard deviation, variance, mean, sum, and margin of error. The related text on the website explains the meaning of standard deviation, how to calculate it using the formula, and its significance. It relates to the standard by supporting students in calculating the standard deviation for a data set, using technology where appropriate.
This resource has a video of a teacher explaining why it is important to check the weather forecast. She explains that she needs to choose the appropriate clothing and plan appropriate activities based on the forecast. There is a link to a student handout, as well as links to other weather-related information and activities. Students must make decisions based on what they know about weather. This can be used to provide instruction for SC15.K.10, which addresses planning and preparing for severe weather. Students learn weather symbols and they can make a rain gauge and a windsock.
Students may observe and describe the phases of the moon using this online tool. Furthermore, they may select their ZIP code and month to see the phases of the moon in their own location. By returning to the site’s homepage, students may learn more about these predicted moon phases.
The Story of the Three Little Pigs is a classic folktale presented digitally in the Children’s Digital Library Foundation’s database of children’s literature. Students may access this book, along with other folktales and pieces of literature, to identify the central theme, message, or moral of the story and explain the meaning conveyed in the text.
Number Play is a virtual simulation tool that can be utilized during math workshops to support the investigation of numbers, quantities, cardinality, and subitizing. The simulation can be scaffolded by teachers and utilized by students in a variety of ways: subitize to 5, subitize to 10, predict the next number in a sequence, identify the number of objects in a set, and count objects to 20. Through purposeful play, students can explore and demonstrate their understanding of these concepts by utilizing the simulation platform. This tool could be used at the beginning of a mini-lesson (such as a form of number talk) or during math workshop as a task for students to engage with.
A picture book, The Coal Thief by Alane Adams, is read aloud by Christian Slater on The SAG-AFTRA Foundation's Daytime Emmy-nominated and award-winning children's literacy website, Storyline Online. This video provides an opportunity for students to establish a purpose before reading a literary text to enhance comprehension. The teacher may instruct students to be listening for a central problem and solution, place and time period (setting), character development, or other literary elements in the text as they listen to the read-aloud.
The resource provides information about plastic pollution and includes suggestions for reducing waste and using plastic alternatives. The science standard is related to this information because it addresses protecting the Earth, recycling, and overuse of landfills. The site is innovative and creative because it includes videos showing children how to make their plastic alternatives for commonly used items. This can be used in the classroom to initiate a class recycling project and could be the impetus for creative projects made by re-purposing items. Additionally, the site provides tips for saving the Earth and animals.
This learning activity can support the development of fluently adding and subtracting within 100 to solve a problem using drawings or equations. This task introduces students to a problem utilizing a short video clip of a man stacking Pringle chips. Students are then tasked with analyzing the video and utilizing the information gained to make estimates and determine how many Pringles were needed to make the Pringle Ringle. This resource supports the development of fluency to 100 through authentic context and purposeful practice. This resource could be used as a formative assessment task for assessing fluency to 100 or as a whole-group engagement activity at the start of a math lesson.
Educators can support the development of fluency to 10 by utilizing a problem-based approach. This task introduces students to a problem utilizing a short video clip of balloons being popped. Students are then tasked with analyzing the video and utilizing the information gained to determine how many balloons are remaining, taking into consideration the number of balloons they started with and the number of balloons that were popped. This resource supports the development of fluency through context and purposeful practice. This resource could be used as a formative assessment task for assessing fluency to 10 or as a whole-group engagement activity at the start of a math lesson.
Students will virtually explore various NASA spacecraft that have been involved in actual Mars missions. They will learn about the technical aspects of the engineering of each spacecraft and the instruments on board, such as spectrometers, seismometers, sampler arms, etc., and how they are used. Students will also know the findings of each spacecraft’s mission. After completing the Mission to Mars artifact immersion activity, students will be prepared to engage in argument from evidence to compare various theories for the formation and changing nature of the universe and our solar system as it relates to Mars and the Martian environment.
After watching video clips from the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire movie, students explore the use of Punnett squares to predict genetic trait inheritance. The objective of this lesson is to articulate concepts related to genetics through direct immersive interaction. Students will describe a trait and give examples; understand the relationship between alleles and heterozygous and homozygous traits; create a 2 x 2 Punnett square and predict traits passed from parents to children; and describe nanotechnology research and engineering in genetics.
In this unit, students are introduced to systems, systems modeling, and systems thinking. The activities provide opportunities for them to explore how systems modeling and systems thinking are used to address complex problems and to apply their knowledge and skills to a challenge in their own lives. During the unit, students build an understanding of real-world systems by analyzing parts of an urban farm system, using an online tool to model a subsystem of the urban farm, developing and modeling an example of a system, and generating ideas for mitigating the negative effects and/or elaborate on impacts to the system.
The resource contains weather and climate data-collecting activities along with variations for several grade levels. Students create tables and graphs as they record weather patterns throughout the school year. Students describe, compare, and summarize their findings. There are extensions to learning, as well as opportunities to integrate math, social studies, and ELA.
EJScreen is an environmental justice mapping and screening tool that provides users with the ability to overlap data and visualize how human demographics impact environmental indicators. EJScreen users choose a geographic area in the upper right-hand search bar, then layer data such as lead paint (under the pollution header) with health disparities such as cancer to examine the health challenges facing the world today. For example, Tallapoosa County, AL is in the 35th percentile for lead paint and the 97th percentile for cancer among adults. EJScreen is a powerful tool, and users can better learn how to use it with videos and user guides on the site.
Windy.com is a visual weather website that offers real-time and accurate meteorological information across the world in visible, graphic form. The user interface is intuitive and easy to use with little instruction. The graphic display shows wind patterns, live radar, land temperature, precipitation, ocean waves, air quality, fires, atmospheric pressure, live webcams, dew point, UV Index, sea temperature, and much more in a visually appealing map format. Users can practice using observations to make inferences, track weather patterns, and make predictions.
This resource includes real-world numerical data where students will create, compare, and discuss factors that might explain the shapes of the histograms. The Alabama Course of Study indicates that students should be able to represent numerical data graphically using histograms. The resource demonstrates an innovative and creative teaching method where students model with mathematics using an inquiry approach to learning. This resource could be used for instructional purposes in the classroom to motivate and engage students in the lesson because working with authentic data will likely be engaging to students.
This hands-on resource guides students to differentiate between living and nonliving things and observe plant germination. By directly engaging with items and monitoring seed growth, students experience tangible biology concepts, enhancing understanding. The activity fosters observational skills, critical thinking, and scientific inquiry in a Kindergarten classroom.
