Lesson Plans

The lesson will focus on observing and creating timelines. The teacher will show students example timelines. Students will state things that they notice from the sample timelines. The teacher will read American Symbols: The Lincoln Memorial by Terri DeGezelle. The teacher and students will work together to create a timeline based on American Symbols: The Lincoln Memorial by Terri DeGezelle. Finally, students will break into groups and work to create a timeline with other American Symbols books.

This unit was created as part of the ALEX Interdisciplinary Resource Development Summit.

This lesson will develop the knowledge of squared and cubed numbers. The students will know when to use the square root and cube root to solve an equation. The students will memorize perfect squares and some cube roots. The answers will be left in radical form. Finally, the students will be able to identify the radicals as rational or irrational.

This lesson results from the ALEX Resource Gap Project.

This lesson allows students to investigate the slope criteria and characteristics of parallel lines using graphing calculators and school staircases.  Students will also use equations and graphs.  Students will work cooperatively to develop and justify ideas/conjectures.

This is a College- and Career-Ready Standards showcase lesson plan.

The lesson will introduce the concept of a matrix. The matrix is labeled by its rows and columns. This lesson will teach the concept of adding, subtracting, scalar multiplication, and multiplication of matrices. This lesson will be a prerequisite for solving systems of equations with matrices.

This lesson results from the ALEX Resource Gap Project.

In collaborative groups of four, students will act out a dinner party where four dinner guests will attend. The students must act out the different ways to arrange four dinner guests. 

This is a College- and Career-Ready Standards showcase lesson plan.

After reading, What if You Had Animal Ears? by Sandra Markle, students will plan, design, and create bat-like ears from various materials for a STEM challenge. Students will test their models and redesign them to improve the effectiveness of their models to increase their own ability to hear by mimicking the external parts of a bat's ear. The students will measure and collect data from tests and compare results between the design and the redesign. This lesson can be completed in two 45 minute sessions or one 90 minute session. 

This lesson plan was created in partnership with the Birmingham Zoo. 

The goal of this lesson is for students to use their knowledge of hurricanes to design and build a hurricane-proof roof for Piggy Sue, The Three Little Pig's cousin.  She has just moved to town and she needs a house that will withstand a hurricane. Students will test various materials and designs to determine the best design for her roof.  Students will work in groups and use the engineering design method to design and build their roofs.  Each group will have a budget to purchase materials for their roofs.

This lesson was created as part of the 2016 NASA STEM Standards of Practice Project, a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.

In Math, students will draw a t-chart to represent dam and flood data obtained from their reading resource. Students will select the information they wish to use from the reading resource (their opinions). Students will then use rulers marked with halves and fourths of an inch to measure lengths and construct a scale model of their own dam, which they can later construct in Science. Students will represent data in a graph and use measurement data by measuring lengths using rulers marked with halves and fourths of an inch. Students will test their scale dams and make changes as needed. 

This unit was created as part of the ALEX Interdisciplinary Resource Development Summit. 

This hands-on, minds-on activity helps students use what they already know about customary measurement to help them add and subtract fractions with like and unlike denominators.

Systems of Equations will be taught over a three-day period: the first day will include a lesson regarding equations that can be solved by graphing, the second day will include a lesson regarding equations that can be solved by substitution, and the third day will include a lesson regarding equations that can be solved by elimination. The students will graph two lines on the same coordinate axis and determine where the two lines cross. The teacher will be able to rock the teenage world with the website "DESMOS". Solving the equations graphically will enhance the graphing skill of the students. The lesson will explain all the ways to graph a line.

This lesson results from the ALEX Resource Gap Project.

Students will gain more conceptual understanding of comparing 3-digit numbers. They will build numbers using base ten blocks and a hundreds chart and work with a partner to decide which number is greater. They will be making decisions about which place value to put the digits in to construct the greatest number.

This is a College- and Career-Ready Standards showcase lesson plan.

This lesson is designed to teach the students that some quadratic equations will have imaginary solutions. The lesson will examine the concept of complex numbers in terms i. The student will use the quadratic formula to solve the equations and write the the solutions in the form a +bi.

This lesson results from the ALEX Resource Gap Project.

Students will throw addition problems or answers (on paper) across the classroom and find the matching problem or answer! Students will use mental math to compute the matching answer. Students will quietly walk around the classroom to find the person with the matching paper. Let’s throw math around!

This is a College- and Career-Ready Standards showcase lesson plan.

This lesson may be taught as part of the Unit Plan - Solutions to Lessen Human Impact on the Environment. In this lesson, students will participate in creating a recycle drive for a classroom project. Students will create the notification for parents for the recycle drive to help collect items to be recycled. Students will decide by voting on which items they will recycle. Students will bring recyclable items to the classroom for the project. Recyclable materials will be sorted, weighed, and graphed to compare the different items.

This unit was created as part of the ALEX Interdisciplinary Resource Development Summit.

This lesson will enhance mathematical vocabulary knowledge and reinforce basic skills for solving equations. Mathematical vocabulary is a vital part of this lesson. The lesson will challenge the minds of seventh-grade students with the theory of angles. The student will use the information in the diagram to write an equation and solve for the variable. Terms that will be identified in the lesson are as follows: supplementary, complementary, adjacent, parallel lines and transversal, and vertical angles.

This lesson results from the ALEX Resource Gap Project.

This lesson will allow students to become familiar with ratios. In this investigative lesson, students will compare ratios and determine equivalent ratios. This is an introductory lesson to be used as part of a unit. 

This is a College- and Career-Ready Standards showcase lesson plan.

This lesson will demonstrate that in order to find the coordinates of the special angles on the unit circle, students will need a knowledge of the first quadrant angles only. Students will use special right triangle relationships for 30° - 60° -90° or 45° - 45° - 90° triangles to find the first quadrant coordinate values. These values will then be reflected across the x- and y-axis to locate the coordinates in the remaining quadrants. Students will also convert the angle measurements from units in degrees to units in radians.  They will become familiar with finding angles in the quadrants by using reference angles (π-x, π+x. 2π-x).

This lesson results from the ALEX Resource Gap Project.

Students will use number bonds and counters as a strategy for finding the missing addend. Students will become aware of the relationship between addition and subtraction. They will also use counting as it is related to addition and subtraction.

This is a College- and Career-Ready Standards showcase lesson plan.

In this lesson, students are asked to provide a written description of both an exponential function and its inverse. They are then introduced to the logarithmic function and will practice writing exponential functions as logarithms and logarithms as exponential functions. Students will evaluate logarithmic expressions and will solve logarithmic equations.

This lesson results from the ALEX Gap Resource Project.

This lesson allows students to use the properties and characteristics of solids, liquids, and gases to determine how different variables affect states of matter.  Students predict what will happen and spend short amounts of time daily to observe and record data.  Students will graph their data into charts to see patterns and solve math problems. 

This lesson was created as a part of the 2016 NASA STEM Standards of Practice Project, a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.

This is a third-grade math lesson on the topic of tornadoes and natural disasters. Students will enter data from an internet search on the number of tornadoes occurring in each state into a spreadsheet. Students will analyze and determine which states are the most active in tornado occurrences and create bar graphs and a scaled picture graph from the data collected. 

This unit was created as part of the ALEX Interdisciplinary Resource Development Summit.

Carlos the Centipede and his friend are holiday shopping for friends and family. Carlos will add, subtract, multiply, and divide decimals. Carlos will change percents to decimals to get all the great discounts during this season of the year.  In addition, he will calculate tax on his purchases. 

This lesson will provide an introduction to finding the inverse of a function or a relation. Through a combination of teacher-led instruction and collaboration, students will discover a method for finding the inverse of a function or relation. The use of an online graphing calculator will aid students with their discovery.

This lesson results from the ALEX Resource Gap Project.

This lesson will allow students to become familiar with the concept of equivalent ratios and similar objects. Through an open investigation, students will develop methods to find equivalent ratios. This is a lesson to be used as part of a unit with Painter Problems and How Far Can You Leap found in ALEX.

This is a College- and Career-Ready Standards showcase lesson plan.

This lesson will use the substitution property to determine solutions to equations and inequalities. The students will be given a replacement set of values. The student will check the values to determine if the result is true or false. The values that are true will be the solution. The student will graph the inequality solutions on the number line.

This lesson results from the ALEX Resource Gap Project.

This lesson allows students to investigate functions and their inverses by hand and using graphing calculators.  Students will also use equations and graphs.  Students will collaborate to develop and justify ideas/conjectures about functions and inverses.

In this lesson, students will examine the amount of annual and seasonal rainfall in four cities to compare decimals to the hundredths place. Students will add and round digits to the thousandth place. Students will utilize technology by navigating to a specific United States climate website to get relatively current and accurate data.

This unit was created as part of the ALEX Interdisciplinary Resource Development Summit.

This lesson is designed to develop knowledge about the angles of a triangle. This lesson will prove that the interior angles of a triangle will have a sum of 180 degrees. This lesson will prove that an exterior angle is the sum of the remote interior angles. This lesson will show the relationships of the angles of parallel lines and transversals.

This lesson results from the ALEX Resource Gap Project.

This lesson presents a hands-on partner activity to introduce second graders to making rectangular arrays. Students will use number dice to roll numbers and then build the coordinating array. An equation will be written to show the sum of the equal addends.

This is a College- and Career-Ready Standards showcase lesson plan.

This lesson will be completed in one class period. This lesson, the third in the series, will focus on another way of solving linear systems, the elimination method. When using this method, the students will multiply one or both of equations to make one of the variables equal. Afterward, the students will add the equations to eliminate the variable.  

This lesson results from the ALEX Resource Gap Project.

Students will be motivated to learn how to build new linear functions from existing linear functions.  Students will bring pictures of themselves and their parents from home to personally involve them in the lesson.  Students will learn to use the patterns inherent in functions to quickly and accurately graph linear functions.  This lesson will only deal with vertical shifts and the steepness of the line.  Horizontal shifts will be dealt with in future lessons. In addtion, in future lessons  students will transfer this knowledge to also graph exponential, quadratic, and absolute value functions.

This is a College- and Career-Ready Standards showcase lesson plan.

This lesson is an introduction to Binomial Expansion and the Binomial Theorem. Students begin by expanding binomials using multiplication. They will examine the expansions looking for patterns. These patterns will be used to develop the Binomial Theorem. Both Pascal's Triangle and Combinations will be used to complete the Binomial Expansion.

This lesson results from the ALEX Resource Gap Project.

Students will observe the changes of the sun over the course of a day and then over a 4 month period. Students will document these changes and then graph them. Finally, students will see the relationship between the patterns of the sun and the effect the pattern has on our daily lives. 

This lesson was created as part of the 2016 NASA STEM Standards of Practice Project, a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.

This lesson will focus on creating timelines. Students will use important dates from their lives to create a personal 5 event timeline. Students will use rulers to measure equal spaces for their timelines. This lesson will require two one-hour sessions. The first lesson will include the lesson introduction, work on timelines, and time for formative assessments as students work. The second session will be used to complete timelines, share projects, and complete exit tickets.

This unit was created as part of the ALEX Interdisciplinary Resource Development Summit.

In cooperative/collaborative groups, students will compare and contrast a two-dimensional pattern and a three-dimensional shape. Students will use a net to label and then construct a rectangular prism. Students will find the surface area of a rectangular prism. As a final performance task, students will create a message box.