This comprehensive Open Source lesson plan is designed for Kindergarten through Middle School level students to learn about life cycles, plants needs, and plant structures & their functions through hands-on investigations with Wisconsin Fast Plants. Depending on the grade level, students engage at an appropriate depth with developing models and constructing arguments that plants have internal and external structures that function to support survival, growth, behavior, and reproduction. This lesson is available as a Google Doc in the Gather, Reason, Communicate instructional model. You may copy the lesson Doc to your own Drive and edit/adapt for your own use--it is shared by the Fast Plants Program as an Open Education Resource" therefore, you are free to use and adapt for noncommercial purposes, provided you attribute the Wisconsin Fast Plants Programs website (www.fastplants.org) as your source and share openly (for noncommercial purposes) any materials you develop with ours.

In this informational text, elementary school readers learn about the difference between weather and climate and about components of the climate system. The text can be used to practice visualizing and other comprehension strategies. Available in K-2 and 3-5 grade bands and as an illustrated book as well as a text document, the story appears in the online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle.

The ability to ask and answer questions while reading is essential to comprehension. This article discusses instructional strategies used to teach questioning and provides many online resources. The article appears in the free, online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle, which explores the seven essential principles of the climate sciences for teachers in k-grade 5 classrooms.

Download this complete set of lessons for an elementary, NGSS-aligned inquiry that foregrounds engineering practices. During the days that are supported by this investigation, students observe flowers on their 14 to 16 day old Fast Plants along with bee structures, learning to connect how the shape of a structure is related to its function. Then, students make and/or use bee sticks to conduct pollination. Finally, students look closely at how pollen is carried on bee bodies and where pollen moves within the flower as concrete examples of the relationship between structure and function. Then, students have the opportunity to use a wide variety of materials to design a solution to a problem (no bees). The solution will be a simple model that mimics the function of a bee in pollinating plants.Complete kits are available from Carolina Biological for this investigation, or everything to grow Fast Plants can be built or obtained locally, using the instructions available on the Fast Plants website. This stand-alone inquiry is a subset of lessons from a comprehensive life cycle unit that is NGSS-aligned, titled "Investigating Plants Needs with Wisconsin Fast Plants" (also available in the Fast Plants digital library).

This 26-page lesson plan, published in a partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Carolina Biological, and Concord Consortium, guides educators through teaching a lesson that accompanies "using Genetics with Data Science and Three-Dimensional Teaching". It describes lesson outcomes and they NGSS standards that align with them, as well as offers a formative assessment of student learning. In particular, this lesson plan covers engaging students in the phenomenon, using CODAP to analyze class data, and gamete formation, and offers examples of sample student work. For more information on how to implement this lesson, Infusing Genetics With Data Science and Three-Dimensional Teaching is available to view separately.

A new instructional model, called Argument-Driven Inquiry (ADI), is introduced to elementary teachers in this article. The author shows how school librarians and classroom teachers can collaborate to help students construct and communicate evidence, or arguments. Evidence buckets, a collaborative activity, and related online resources are presented. The article appears in the free online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle, which is structured around the seven essential principles of climate literacy.

Construct and measure the energy efficiency and solar heat gain of a cardboard model house. Use a light bulb heater to imitate a real furnace and a temperature sensor to monitor and regulate the internal temperature of the house. Use a bright bulb in a gooseneck lamp to model sunlight at different times of the year, and test the effectiveness of windows for passive solar heating.

A bungee jump involves jumping from a tall structure while connected to a large elastic cord. Design a bungee jump that is "safe" for a hard-boiled egg. Create a safety egg harness and connect it to a rubber band, which is your the "bungee cord." Finally, attach your bungee cord to a force sensor to measures the forces that push or pull your egg.

Earthquakes happen when forces in the Earth cause violent shaking of the ground. Earthquakes can be very destructive to buildings and other man-made structures. Design and build various types of buildings, then test your buildings for earthquake resistance using a shake table and a force sensor that measures how hard a force pushes or pulls your building.

This professional development article identifies resources that show young learners (K-grade 5) how scientists study Earth's climate and make predictions. The online lessons either allow students to collect and analyze data or learn about tools and technologies that make data collection possible. The lessons are aligned with national content standards for science education. The article appears in the free, online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle, which examines the recognized essential principles of climate literacy and the climate sciences for elementary teachers and their students.

This article provides background information that will help teachers present the science associated with the study of climate, past, present and future. The magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle is structured around the recognized principles of climate literacy. The author explains the science concepts included in the principle related to climate study and research and also identifies additional sources of information.

This list of carefully selected books for grades K-5 highlights nonfiction about climate proxies, those preserved physical characteristics, such as fossils, that scientists use to reconstruct past climates. Also highlighted are a few books that provide information about two past climatic events -- the last ice age and the Dust Bowl. In each issue of the free, online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle, the virtual bookshelf recommends books that accurately portray the theme drawn from the principles of climate sciences.

This article aligns the concepts of Essential Principle 2 of the Climate Sciences to the K-5 content standards of the National Science Education Standards. The author also identifies common misconceptions about heat and the greenhouse gases effect and offers resources for assessing students' understanding of interactions among components of the Earth system. This article continues the examination of the climate sciences and climate literacy on which the online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle is structured.

Each issue of the free, online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle explores an essential principle of climate science and climate literacy with background information, lessons, activities, original stories, and more for the K-5 classroom. This article shows the alignment of these materials with the content standards of the National Science Education Standards.

This resource, provided by Wisconsin Fast Plants and CurrikiStudio, contains a set of six different learning activities that can be implemented in classrooms to teach natural selection. Organized in playlists, these interactive lessons guide students through understanding and applying knowledge of natural selection. The specific playlists and modules include: Population Pre-think for discussion: Factors that affect traits in populations Checking for understanding: Investigating Change Over Time in Populations Exploring Selection Models Looking for Evidence in Data Selection Models Genetics Review The Language of Genetics Looking for Patterns and Analyzing Population Data

In this 8th grade science lesson, students test the pH levels of soil from three different sites in the garden to determine the level of acidity in the garden soil.

Description: In this activity students become acquainted with the anatomy and biology of seeds. They will use lenses and scales and make drawings to scale. Students will measure and calculate magnifications and they will begin to understand relationships among these. They will organize and summarize their data and, as they do so, they will be developing the understanding and skills needed to undertake more detailed investigations on the biology and reproduction of Fast Plants. Learning Objectives This activity is designed to strengthen students' observational and quantitative skills. In participating in this activity students will: - learn to use magnifying lenses, microscopes and dissecting tools for detailed observation" - measure scales with rulers" - draw to scale, with accuracy and precision to understand scale and magnification" - learn features of the external anatomy of seeds that are associated with certain features of the internal anatomy of seeds" and - estimate the amount of water required to be taken up by seeds in order to initiate germination.

From this original story, young readers and listeners learn about four tools scientists use to study climate - climate stations, weather balloons, satellites, and buoys. The story is available at two reading levels and in three formats - text-only, illustrated booklet, and electronic book. Glossary included. Each issue of Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle contains an original story that expands on the theme.

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.

This blog post, written by Frieda Reichsman, discusses how educators can implement three-dimensional teaching methods into classrooms and meet the Next Generation Science Standards. The article introduces the 3D Teacher Moves Table, a lesson-planning tool created by Hedi Lauffer at Wisconsin Fast Plants, as a guide for high school biology teachers to use when developing lessons and curricula to support students' data analysis skills. Additionally, this article introduces a lesson investigation using Fast Plants and data analysis, where educators can implement the 3D Teacher Moves Table. The Biological Variation in Fast Plants Lesson Plan can be available to view separately.