This lesson is an introduction to a unit on habitat. It is designed to combine literature and science.

This activity is an investigation to determine the effect of soil type on plant growth. The students will develop an understanding of the plant as producer.

This article highlights hands-on or multimedia lesson plans about plant structures, growth and development, seed production, and dispersal. Science lessons are paired with suggested literacy lesson plans. All lessons are aligned to national standards.

This article highlights hands-on or multimedia lesson plans about the tundra and ecosystem concepts. Science lessons are paired with suggested literacy lesson plans. All lessons are aligned to national standards.

To be able to understand the importance of the environment for our health, we need to know a little about the interdependence between environment and humankind. This unit will look at interactions between plants, animals and the physical and chemical environment, as well as considering ways in which humans have altered, and are altering this environment. These changes have health implications that are not always immediately obvious. Frequently, we initiate changes that are going to have their effects some time in the future, and we will be looking at the legacies that we leave to future generations. We move on to consider our own demise, and ask what exactly it is that we think we will be leaving for those who follow.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Host-microbiome interactions are a critical component of host health, and plants have a particularly complex relationship with their microbiomes. Understanding these functional relationships will allow us to predict, and even influence, host fitness. Many ‘-omics’ techniques have been developed, and each is a powerful tool solo, but combining them opens the door to a more holistic, systems-level understanding. This strategy, called holo-omics, requires careful experimental design and faces several challenges as a field. First, it currently lacks well-tested analytical frameworks. Second, there is a need for freely available, specialized bioinformatics tools, as most focus on just one data source and don't integrate host and microbe data. Lastly, the heterogeneous nature of holo-omics data requires a wide range of expertise - including plant biologists, microbe experts, statisticians, and computational biologists..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

In this activity, the students will use wax paper shaped as leaves and kite string to build a shelter to protect them from the rain. The students will then test the shelters for durability and water resistance.

This lesson plan helps students understand the factors that affect water quality and the conditions that allow for different animals and plants to survive. Students will look at the effects of water quality on various water-related activities and describe water as an environmental, economic and social resource. The students will also learn how engineers use water quality information to make decisions about stream modifications.

In this activity, to learn about the biological needs of mosses, students will grow and maintain their own moss terrarium. Through daily maintenance and observation, students will identify those factors necessary for the successful cultivation of moss.

In this Biodiversity Counts activity, students learn how to press and preserve plant specimens. The online page includes illustrated instructions about how to layer and maintain pressings until the specimens have dried.

Hank introduces us to biogeochemical cycles by describing his two favorites: carbon and water. The hydrologic cycle describes how water moves on, above, and below the surface of the Earth, driven by energy supplied by the sun and wind. The carbon cycle does the same... for carbon!

Chapters:
1) Hydrologic Cycle
A) Clouds
B) Runoff
C) Oceans
D) Evapotranspiration

2) Carbon Cycle -
A) Plants -
B) Fossil Fuels -
C) Oceans -
D) Global Warming -

This activity is designed for students to discover how making observations of the environment is the key to making sound predictions. Students will also learn how both positive and negative outcomes of these predictions can affect and shape future decisions.

nanimate Life is an open textbook covering a very traditional biological topic, botany, in a non-traditional way. Rather than a phylogenetic approach, going group by group, the book considers what defines organisms and examines four general areas of their biology: structure (size, shape, composition and how it comes to be); reproduction (including sex when present); energy and material needs, acquisition and manipulations; and finally their interactions with conditions and with other organisms including agricultural interactions between plants and people. Although much of the text is devoted to vascular plants, the book comparatively considers ‘EBA = everything but animals’ (hence the title): plants, photosynthetic organisms that are not plants (‘algae’, as well as some bacteria and archaebacteria), fungi, and ‘fungal-like’ organisms. The book includes brief ‘fact sheets’ of fifty-nine organisms/groups that biologists should be aware of, ranging from the very familiar (corn, yeast, pines) to the unfamiliar (cryptophytes, diatoms, late-blight of potato). These groups reflect the diversity of inanimate life.

This updated edition was published in July 2022 and includes corrections, revisions, additional figures, and fact-sheets for several more groups.

Students will explore the garden/outdoor classroom for examples of different plant structures and determine how plants use these structures to meet their needs.

Students will use knowledge of ecosystems and living and non-living things to classify objects they find outdoors and create simple food chains.

This activity is an inquiry and field study based. Students will be trying to observe, document, compare, contrast, and communicate what information they were able to gather. The will use this information to make in inference about the organisms they have found and classify them as either an insect or not an insect.

This sample syllabus for a course on planets, exoplanets, and SETI (using the OpenStax Astronomy textbook) may help beginning instructors think through what sorts of things they might want to put on a syllabus. It can also provide guidance on how to select key sections of the textbook for a course that doesn’t have time to cover everything.

This lab activity demonstrates the difference between stabilizing and directional natural selection using two separate populations of sunflower seeds.

Students will observe simple plants, develop an investigable question, and form an investigation. They will document their investigation in their science notebooks.

This activity is a guided inquiry investigation where students gather data on which soil is the best for growing plants. Student will interpret their data, and develop a conclusion from the data. The student will determine which type of soil they would like to use in the next activity of making their own terrariums. The data collected could lead to further questions, which can be investigated in some extension activities.