Lesson Plans

Students will use the free online coding program Scratch to learn the basics of coding and how to use blocks and animations to create a game. Students will create a game to find multiples of a given factor by making a character fly into the correct multiple of the given factor. The student will go through a series of coding steps to create a background, make a character fly, and create the factor and multiple game.

This lesson plan was created as a result of the Girls Engaged in Math and Science, GEMS Project.

This lesson will focus on American symbols. Students will identify American symbols and explain how they represent the United States of America. Symbols include the Liberty Bell, Bald Eagle, Statue of Liberty, United States Flag, Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial. Students will work in pairs and conduct research about American symbols and create a digital story about a symbol of their choosing.

This lesson was created as part of a collaboration between Alabama Technology in Motion and ALEX.

The lesson will begin with students accessing their prior knowledge of weather and climates by completing a warm-up writing prompt. Students will then move to reading texts on the subjects of tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, and droughts to determine if and how climate affects these weather phenomena. In groups, students will create a half-poster that describes their findings in text and pictures. At the end of the lesson, students will view a graph to extend their learning about tornadoes and hint at a future lesson while also completing an "exit ticket" as a means of summative assessment. 

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

The lesson will begin with a brief review of the previous lesson from the unit, "Increasing Public Safety During Tornadoes," on how climates and geographic locations can affect weather patterns and produce natural disasters. Students will watch a short video during the before strategy to engage learners in the lesson on a particular natural disaster--tornadoes. Students will read various texts and charts in order to understand the causes and effects of tornadoes, putting the information in a T-chart to help organize their thoughts. Students will then discuss their findings with an elbow partner and then write a two-paragraph cause-and-effect essay which will serve as the summative assessment.

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

The lesson will begin by students performing a think-aloud as they consider the similarities of five words:  tornado, shelter, basement, underground, and safe room. Students will use a pros and cons graphic organizer as they read articles on three different types of tornado shelters: underground shelters, part of the house shelters, and prebuilt shelters. The students will find the advantages and disadvantages of each type of structure. At the end of the lesson, the teacher will create a table that lists all the shelters and the pros and cons of each. Students will then determine which shelter they feel is most efficient in an "exit slip" response. 

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

This is a lesson presenting energy and work. It covers: types of energy, forms of energy, work, law of conservation of energy, and renewable and nonrenewable energy sources. In the activities section, one will find links to Internet sites that explore concepts of energy and work. Interactive labs are also included in this lesson. The lesson can serve as a student-led or teacher-led lesson. It gives a brief statement of facts; therefore, the teacher must provide expansions, if needed. The expansions could come from the Internet sites since many of them go into more detail about the concepts. The teacher will also be expected to supply some form of assessment for the lesson.

The students will gain a good understanding of the history of Expressionism painting and its use of color and paint application to establish an “emotional feel”. They will use this knowledge to create their own expressionistic oil painting.

Many times when people think of art, they only think about the visual arts. Music is also an art form. Music has the ability to inspire us, change our mood, comfort us, and teach us. It is hard to imagine a day without any sort of music. Therefore, it is necessary that when teaching the arts, students also learn about the value of music as an art form.

The students will go on an in-school scavenger hunt to get to know the many kinds of people that make up an elementary school community. They will work in small groups and use digital cameras to take pictures of the workers they find. By completing the scavenger hunt, the students will gain a better understanding of how we are all dependent on one another in a small community.

This lesson is an adaptation of a lesson in Character Education Made Easy. It helps early elementary students (especially kindergartners) learn about the influence of Martin Luther King, Jr., why he is remembered, and the problems he worked to change.

The students will use critical thinking skills and artistic abilities to "transform" an image into something completely different. The original images can be taken with a digital camera and printed out or cut from old magazines.

This lesson is designed to inform students about the organization of our nation's government. Students will be introduced to the three branches of American government and the responsibilities of each. They will discuss the requirements for becoming President and take a "virtual tour" of the White House. All of this is done through the use of a digital slideshow, which includes a direct link to the Internet for further study.

This is a group activity that allows students to use predictions to learn about the lifestyle of American colonists.

Students will construct a model of a dragon based on traits inherited from the parent dragons. This activity demonstrates the inheritance of dominant and recessive traits, codominance, and incomplete dominance. Students will use Punnett Squares to predict genotypic and phenotypic ratios of the dragon population in the class. This project could serve as a culminating activity for Genetics and the Inheritance of traits.  

This activity was adapted from Alabama Science in Motion.

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

This is a technology-based Biology lesson on the Biomes of the world. Students will work in groups and research their designated terrestrial biome. Students will research abiotic and biotic factors in their biome. Students will create a digital presentation of their biome using the preferred presentation platform. The presentation will summarize how the abiotic and biotic factors interact in their biome. Students will then use the collected data from the presentations to create food chains and food webs for their designated biomes. 

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

Students will be introduced to the International Phonetic Alphabet and learn how to apply it to songs in foreign languages. In this particular lesson, they will learn the symbols for vowels used in Italian and apply them to a simple, seventeenth-century Italian art song, "Star Vicino". Students will be evaluated through individual podcasts created and edited using Audacity.

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. 

Carlos the Centipede and his friend are Christmas 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. 

Waste disposal is a problem for the entire Earth and must be dealt with in a responsible manner to maintain biodiversity in ecosystems. After investigating the amount of waste they produce as an individual, family, class, school, community, and society, students investigate how items decompose in a landfill and develop arguments to support a solution to the problem. Students engage in argument to defend the effectiveness of a design solution on a proposed method of disposing of waste in their school and community. 

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

This hands-on, minds-on activity helps students use what they already know about customary measurement (CCRS 2010 #18 [5.MD.1]: Convert among different-sized standard measurement units within a given measurement system.) to help them add and subtract fractions with like and unlike denominators.

Students will learn ways to add using the associative property of addition. Students will view a PowerPoint presentation to introduce associative property of addition.

Students will use technology, hands-on interaction, and active participation to compare and measure different heights of objects.

During this lesson students will complete hands-on activities.Technology will be incorporated with this lesson. Students will sort conversation heart candy by colors. Students will then use their data to complete picture graphs.

In this lesson, students will explore straight, right, acute, and obtuse angles. Students will go to the playground to search for angles. The students will use digital cameras to record their findings. They will use their findings to create a slideshow to present to the class.

This lesson is a hands-on, game-based lesson. It should be part of a larger unit of study on number sense, estimation, and/or place value. The lesson involves students in a game-based activity which gives them a concrete understanding of the relationship between number values, place value, and the accepted mathematical rule for rounding numbers.

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

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.

Students will delve into discussion and writing about plot development, including generating their own reflections, original ideas, and influences on how events interact and shape character, mood, tone, and conflict.

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

Students will be given a task card stating how to spend a certain amount of money. Students must look through sale papers, find the items to purchase, add the totals, multiply quantities, subtract from the total, and write a check to purchase the items.

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

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 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.

This lesson is part of a larger unit dealing with Early American Literature. In this lesson, students will become familiar with the figurative devices and strategies used by 17th Century Puritan poets when creating closed or fixed form poetry. 

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

Children often do not understand spiders because spiders look scary. In this lesson, students will graph spider preferences and record observations of spiders in a natural habitat. Students will research spider information using the Internet. Students will illustrate a vivarium for a spider habitat, including  five environmental characteristics. 

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

Students will learn to make inferences based on evidence and prior knowledge about their teacher (by looking at objects), classmates (by viewing drawings or PowerPoint), and a reading passage.

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

Using the plot development toolkit, students will identify and explain plot development of a class text, including generating their own reflections, original ideas, and discussion regarding how events interact and shape character, mood, tone, and conflict.

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

This lesson will allow students to become familiar with the concept of unit rate. Through an open investigation students will develop methods to find unit rate with a table, equivalent ratios, or an equation. This is a lesson to be used as part of a unit with "Painter Problems" and "How Big Should It Be?"

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