Nocturnal Animals and Their Five Senses (Lesson Plan 10)

www.pbs.org/teachers/connect/resources/7843/preview/


This lesson geared toward 3 to 6 year olds aims to teach the 5 senses by exploring how nocturnal animals use their senses in the Cat in the Hat book, I Love the Nightlife by Tish Rabe!

I think this literacy connection is a great way to introduce the lesson for such young children because the story and pictures will engage them and give them something to refer back to when examining how they use their own 5 senses. The lesson also involves the teacher cutting fruit for the class to share...they will listen to the sound the fruit makes as they watch the teacher cut it, feel and smell their own piece of fruit, and lastly, taste the fruit as they eat it!

Introducing Physical Science (Lesson Plan 9)

www.discoveryeducation.com/teachers/free-lesson-plans/introduction-to-physical-science.cfm

Elementary school isn't too early to start talking about physics! With this plan, students can begin to explore  motion, force, and Newton's Laws. It engages students kinesthetically with a game of marbles so that they can see the law of motion in action as they play. After the game, the class will discuss what laws of motion they witnessed.

Be a Weather Forecaster! (Lesson Plan 8)

www.oar.noaa.gov/k12/pdfs/forsall.pdf

This lesson from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration let's kids take on the role of weather forecaster, to find out how the weather can really be predicted, and in what ways data is gathered to make those predictions.

The lesson has data collection sheets for students to use with the administration's website. If I were doing the lesson, I would also try to allow time for students to go outside and write down their observations about the weather.

Animal Instincts (Lesson Plan 7)

www.discoveryeducation.com/teachers/free-lesson-plans/animal-instincts.cfm

In this lesson, children will learn the difference between instinct and learned behavior, as well as the connection between animals' environment and behavior--two things which I think children are interested in but that we really talk about with them. The bulk of the lesson has students researching different animals and keeping logs of their behaviors, but for younger children, they offer the adaptation of coming up with a class list of behaviors for different animals and discussing how those behaviors are helpful to survival.

Sewer Bugs (Lesson Plan 6)

www.crystalballscience.com/images/lessons/Sewer%20Bugs.pdf

This lesson plan about density immediately caught my eye because I can remember a student teacher presenting it when I was in 6th grade. It involves dropping raisins into soda and watching them sink and pop up due to their changing density when the carbonated bubbles attach to the wrinkles in the raisins. The hook is, you don't refer to them as raisins, you call them sewer bugs. Ew! Children will be dying to know what they are looking at and why they are seeing what they are seeing. They'll be especially blown away when you reach into the soda and pull out one of the "bugs" and eat it!

You are Unique: A Genetics Lesson (Lesson Plan 5)

www.reachoutmichigan.org/funexperiments/agesubject/lessons/genetics.html

Who knew students in the early elementary grades could do a lesson in genetics! This lesson plan makes it possible with a graphic organizer, vocabulary list, and ideas to extend the idea of genes and our different inherited traits. I would love to use this lesson to start a discussion about how everyone is different and how we should celebrate those differences. Name-calling and making-fun is often an issue in elementary school, so this lesson could be a great way to talk about accepting all of our differences as humans.

Going Green-house (Lesson Plan 4)

www.reachoutmichigan.org/funexperiments/agesubject/lessons/energy/greenhouse.html

In today's world of panic over climate change, kids are probably bombarded with phrases like "going green," and the "green house effect," but do they really know what these terms mean? Here is a way to make a mini-example of what is going on with the earth, in any kindergarten through fourth grade  classroom (I think the idea may be too abstract for preschoolers).