Lesson Plans

This lesson is meant to be used as a culminating project after students have learned about different biomes. Students will start out by separating different plants into their respective biomes based on their characteristics. Then students will create a species that is adapted to survive in an assigned biome.  

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.

Students will create sun shadow plots to demonstrate how the position and motion of Earth with respect to the sun causes changes in the length and direction of shadows. Students will observe and record shadow data for an entire day.

After collecting the data, students will analyze the data and create a line graph to determine at which time of the day the longest shadows are created.

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.

The goal of this activity is for students to simulate the constructive forces of a volcanic eruption, observe how lava flows build up layers of a landform, study the stratigraphy of the new landform, and connect the simulation to events in the natural world.

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.

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 this lesson, the students will use the technology resource Mission:Biomes to research and gather data for precipitation and temperatures for assigned biomes.  The students will use the data to create a bar graph to display climate data for each biome.  

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.

Students will collaborate, design, and construct a device that filters contaminated water. 

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 is adapted from a lesson entitled, "Marble Run", from the NASA Education Guide Amusement Park Physics with a NASA Twist.

Students will explore the effects of force, speed, motion, and gravity in creating a roller coaster track for a marble.

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 this lesson which emphasizes hands-on, inquiry-based activities, students will create two models of the digestive system and determine the correct placement of various organs of the digestive system. Students will use the model to compare mechanical and chemical digestion. Students will use information provided by the model to explain why food spends various amounts of time in a particular organ. To extend the learning of this module, students will design an experiment to determine the effect of introducing new foods to a baby’s diet.  The module also includes a presentation, a word search puzzle, and a bingo game emphasizing vocabulary words related to the digestive tract.

This is a hands-on, cooperative learning activity where students are using items purchased from a grocery store to design a device and construct a shock-absorbing system out of paper, straws, and miniature marshmallows that will protect two astronauts when landing on Mars. Students are able to develop engineering skills to develop a spacecraft to land on Mars, a mission NASA is currently working on. Students propose a model of a spacecraft to land astronauts safely on the moon, test it, and then revise.

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 allows students to construct solar system models showing the comparative sizes of the planets to a scale.  The students will also use their models to carry out an investigation to analyze and interpret the distances between planets in the Solar System. This lesson uses common objects easily obtained by teachers.

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.

Students will participate in a discussion of the Moon´s habitability. The students will create a plan for the design and creation of a self-sustaining ecosystem within a lunar station.

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.

The student engineers will design and build a new water filtration system for an overpopulated, poverty-stricken community that is drinking contaminated water from wells, rivers or springs not treated by municipal water systems. 

Students will be involved in planning, designing, building, collaborating, calculating, budgeting, analyzing, and reflecting on a real-world design challenge. 

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.

Students will explore greenhouse gases, how they effect the carbon cycle and the human role in climate change.  

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 this lesson, students will investigate the relationship between mass, acceleration, and force as described in Newton’s Second Law of Motion.

Students will work in teams to use a wooden car and rubber bands to toss a small mass off of a car. The car, resting on rollers, will be propelled in opposite directions. Students will vary the mass that is being tossed by each car and change the number of rubber bands used to toss the mass.  Students will then measure how far the car rolls in response to the action force generated.

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 uses hands-on activities to discuss water filtration. Students will have the opportunity to explore water filtration by filtering water through a variety of materials and using potatoes to grow and test the bacteria levels of the water.

With a focus on nanotechnology, this lesson discusses the benefits of embedding silver ions in filters to kill harmful bacteria. At the end of this lesson students will have the opportunity to put their knowledge to the test in a written discussion by designing a solution to a mock water crisis.

This module was authored by the Auburn University NanoBio MSP Fellows Will Haynes, Chelsea Lindskog, Hannah Taylor, and Catherine Wolfe under the supervision and guidance of Drs. Virginia Davis and Chris Schnittka.

Raising heavy payloads to orbit is challenging.  Rockets require powerful engines and massive amounts of propellants. NASA is looking for creative ideas for launching heavy lift vehicles to deliver supplies to Mars.  Student teams receive identical parts to build rockets. The team that is able to lift the greatest payload into space (the ceiling) is the winner.

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 this activity, students try to work their way out of a circular maze, thereby modeling the movement of a photon as it travels through the radiative zone of the sun. Classroom discussion after they complete the activity is focused on the Standard Solar Model and its importance in further scientific studies of the sun. 

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.

Students will construct 3-dimensional representations of each known element of the periodic table using cereal-sized boxes as their mediums. By creating these models, students will gain an in-depth understanding of their chosen element's discovery, history, unique properties, and place on the Modern Periodic Table. Students will also be able to identify and describe basic periodic trends.

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 this lesson, students construct balloon-powered rockets to launch the greatest payload possible to the classroom ceiling. Student teams receive identical parts to build rockets. Then the teams compete to launch the greatest number of paper clips to space (the ceiling).

By utilizing this lesson, the students begin to understand that the scientific progress achieved is not a static process but a fluid one that has developed and changed overtime.  They also begin to realize that scientific advancement has incorporated a variety of scientists throughout history and time periods.

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.

Students investigate the properties of gasses using the gas laws and explore the application to aeronautics. 

This lesson is adapted from the NASA Education Guide Pushing the Envelope: A NASA Guide to Engines.  The activities used include the following:  Gas Laws (pg 27-28); Gas Law Problems - Boyle's Law (pg 29-30); Gas Law Problems - Charles's Law (pg 31-32); Gas Law Problems - Gay Lussac's Law (pg 33-34); Air Density (pg 61-62). 

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 this lesson, students will share their background knowledge of gravity and how it affects skydivers. After a brief whole group discussion on gravity, students will work in small groups to explain why the International Space Station does not fall to Earth. Finally, students will create a model helicopter to provide evidence that the gravitational force of earth will cause the helicopter to fall downward toward the center of Earth.

This lesson results from a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and ASTA.

In this hands-on investigation, students will utilize the hydroponic method to grow a bean plant from  a bean seed. Over the course of a 2 week time period, students will make detailed observations and sketches of the actual bean growth and make predictions about growth patterns over the weekend time periods.

Students will create a cartoon to defend the position that plants obtain materials needed for growth primarily from air and water.

This lesson results from a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and ASTA.

Students will be able to locate the sun by using the Hertzsprung-Russel diagram to plot the sun's location.  This lesson can be an opening activity, review activity, or a quick lab.

This lesson results from a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and ASTA.

This lesson, “Push Me, Pull You” is Day 2 in a series of lessons that help to explain how forces affect objects. In this lesson, students will work as a whole group and in pairs to investigate objects that push or pull other objects, or objects that must be pushed or pulled. As a group, the class will decide on a definition of "push" and "pull".  They will then go outdoors to identify and explore objects that can be pushed or pulled. They will demonstrate pushing and pulling on the playground by doing "push-ups" and "pull-ups" using playground equipment.  In Day 1, “Move It!”, students will identify objects that can be moved and demonstrate how movement puts objects in motion In Day 3, “Tug of War!” students describe relative strengths and directions of the push or pull applied to an object.

This lesson results from a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and ASTA.

The students will investigate camouflage and countershading as an example of penguin adaptation. Then students engage in an experiment to demonstrate the effectiveness of blubber as an insulator against the cold temperatures penguins typically experience. Students will learn about a variety of external penguin structures and explore the insulating value of an internal structure, blubber.

This lesson results from a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and ASTA.

Students will use transparent, translucent, opaque, and reflective items that they find around the classroom or school to investigate how light passes through an object. This activity will demonstrate how light behaves around objects. The first investigation will take students on a scavenger hunt to find objects that fit each type.  Students will classify each object using a flashlight and analyzing how light passes through the object. Then the final investigation will allow students to experiment with how the amount of light that each type allow effects the rate at which ice will melt.

This lesson results from a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and ASTA.

Students will develop a scale model of the sun, Earth, and moon system based on a one-meter sun. Students will first interact with a technology-based scaled model and view a video clip on scaling the solar system. Students will then scale the diameter of the Earth and moon, as well as the distance from the Earth to the sun, and from the Earth to moon. Students will be required to utilize mathematical skills, such as division, rounding, and metric system conversions. After scaling the diameters and distances, students will create the scaled model. 

This lesson results from a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and ASTA.

Students will be conducting a series of investigations in order to compare and contrast the various intermolecular forces that exist between compounds. First, students will rank 4 substances according to their melting points. Second, students will work together using the jigsaw research approach to understand the 4 types of intermolecular forces. And lastly, students will use the information gained to go back to their data collected and compare their original compounds and type of intermolecular bond they exhibit.

This lesson plan results from a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and ASTA.

This lesson, "Tug of War!" is Day 3 in a series of lessons that help to explain how forces affect objects. In this lesson, students describe relative strengths and directions of the push or pull applied to a ball's movement.  Students will work in a whole group and then with a partner, sitting in a circle, to push and then receive a ball, with a flattened palm, from another student. Students will observe the "collision" of the ball and hand. They will then go outdoors or in the gym to kick the ball with the side of the foot to direct the ball in different directions. The ball will be stopped or redirected in the same way. Students will then pull a ball toward themselves and describe the difference in the push and pull of the ball. Students could play a "Kickball Game" to watch the "collision" of the ball. In Day 1, “Move It!," students identify objects that can be moved and demonstrate how movement puts objects in motion. In Day 2, “Push Me, Pull You,”  students demonstrate that objects can be moved by pushing or pulling them.

This lesson results from a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and ASTA.

Students will create a Rube Goldberg Machine while working in a small group through this lesson.  They will then explain the energy transformations present in their own machine and in those of their classmates.  This will ensure their understanding of the law of conservation of energy as well as energy transformations.  

This lesson results from a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and ASTA.

In this lesson, students will use technology to construct a model of a balanced ecosystem that shows how energy cycles from one organism to the next by completing research and writing short passages about their ecosystem. Students will then compare their balanced model ecosystem and describe a change or introduce an invasive species to show how the balance of their model ecosystem will change to adapt. As students are designing their model they will also describe the relationships of the components that make up an ecosystem and causes/effects of unbalanced ecosystems. 

This lesson results from a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and ASTA.

Students will design and conduct an experiment to see how temperature can affect the particle motion of water. The students will test molecular motion in different temperatures of water by adding food coloring to the water and observing the motion of the water molecules. This investigation will allow the students to see the movement of food coloring in water and how an increase or decrease in temperature will affect that movement.

This lesson results from a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and ASTA.

In this lesson, students will investigate materials to determine which materials would be best to harness the power of the wind. Students will design, construct, and race a puff mobile.  Students will create a class chart to record data from the puff mobile race. Students will compare features from the puff mobiles with the best race times.

This lesson results from a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and ASTA.

In this interdisciplinary lesson, students will apply the Engineer Design Process to design a structure to remove waste from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The lesson involves components of STEM and English Language Arts.

This lesson results from collaboration between the Alabama Department of Education and ASTA. 

This investigation allows students to explore the real-life meaning of solar energy. Students designing and engineering a solar oven using a  pizza box. Completed projects will be tested and then evaluated for effectiveness.

This lesson results from a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and ASTA.