Explore bending of light between two media with different indices of refraction. See how changing from air to water to glass changes the bending angle. Play with prisms of different shapes and make rainbows.

These are photographs of the historic Pearson House in Keosauqua, Iowa. Image resolutions of lower value can be downloaded for free.

The Berkeley Unified School District has pioneered garden education since the first school garden was planted at LeConte Elementary in 1983. This single garden inspired many others, and over the next twelve years it evolved into a multi-school Gardening and Cooking Program with annual support from a federal grant of $1.9 million from the California Nutrition Network. We lost this funding in 2013, along with many other nutrition and garden education programs, at which point we refocused from a nutrition-based program to one that supports teachers and students in the academic classroom.
This change encouraged us to develop a pilot curriculum in 2013–1014, with support from teachers, garden educators, and consultants from the Edible Schoolyard, Berkeley. Our team of experts gleaned from existing lessons and research to synthesize drafts to best fit our own school gardens. We rewrote the pilot lessons with input from our school communities and with incredible support from P. Rachel Levin, an English Language Coach, to develop academic and health targets accessible to all of our students.
The curriculum builds upon many years of educating our students in the garden and scales up content across grades and lessons for instructional scaffolding. It is designed as an interactive teaching tool to be co-taught with classroom teachers and garden instructors as leads. Each lesson connects directly to standards: Next Generation Science, Common Core State, Physical Education, and Environmental and Health Education. Our concise and easy-to-follow lessons are a packed 45 minutes for preschool through fifth grade. Flexibility is important to us, so some lessons include several activities that teachers can choose from to accommodate their lesson plans. Consistency is also important, so we follow themes and lesson structure found in the Curriculum Map.

Students will discuss the definition of a biography and determine what elements it contains.  They will research a famous person and create a web graphic organizer with key achievements and personal information from their life. Peer feedback will be given on the web creation and then an oral presentation will be given.

This lesson is going to walk through the timeline of birth control.  You will need to print out the birth control note guide for them to fill out while the read the SoftChalk.

In this online learning module, you will: 1: Understand blended learning models2: Learn to design blended learning experiences

Blender 3D: Noob to Pro is a product of shared effort by numerous team members and anonymous editors. Its purpose is to teach people how to create three-dimensional computer graphics using Blender, a free software application. This book is intended to be used in conjunction with other on-line resources that complement it.

This is the final task of the Body Systems App unit.  It is the presentation task.  

In the Body System Amusement Parks project, students team up to create amusement parks based on the various systems and organs within the human body. With the power of abstraction, each attraction represents the cardiovascular system, the muscular system, the digestive system, etc. Teams create both 3D scale models and presentations to an unnamed wealthy investment firm looking to build a new park in the students’ very own town. This activity was heavily inspired by a post from Danielle Dace.

This lesson ties in our 7th grade science curriculum where students study the Systems of the Body. It also looks at how these systems function in relation to athletics. Students are to design an app that looks at these systems and how an app can help an athlete train for their sport.

This guided inquiry activity, in which ice is used to boil water in a Florence flask, works well in the introductory class to a chemistry or physical science course. The students will learn the difference between observation and inference and apply this understanding to various other situations in which observations and inferences must be made. The students will also use outside sources to try to explain why the activity worked.

In this lesson, students will examine electronegativities of atoms relative to one another to determine if a covalent bond will be classified as polar or nonpolar. Students will use an online simulation to help them understand the importance of lone pairs of electrons as well as bonding pairs of electrons. Students will use ball-and-stick models to examine and identify the shapes of various molecules. This lesson results from a collaboration between the Alabama State Department of Education and ASTA.

Needing a book talk lesson for students in grades 1-2?  Any teacher or substitute can use this lesson as a Language Arts project. This book talk for Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See by Bill Martin Jr./Eric Carle will have students thinking of animals and their unique sounds to include in their own book., which they will think of on their own, and put into a book format. To take it a step further, students can read their books in front of the class or in rotating partners or small groups, when their books are completed.

Writing is a time-honored tradition.  It can be so much more than a few paragraphs about what you did this summer.  What are some of your favorite stories? Movies? Songs? Websites? All of these were written by someone. But, few were written in one fell swoop. Brainstorming is a widely used practice for generating ideas.  In this lesson we will be letting our imaginations run wild.  One of the most important aspects of writing is knowing what you are going to write about.  

This collection of activities is based on a weekly series of space science problems distributed to thousands of teachers during the 2009-2010 school year. They were intended for students looking for additional challenges in the math and physical science curriculum in grades 9 through 12. The problems were created to be authentic glimpses of modern science and engineering issues, often involving actual research data. The problems were designed to be ‘one-pagers’ with a Teacher’s Guide and Answer Key as a second page. This compact form was deemed very popular by participating teachers.

This is a reflection activity for students to help make budgeting more relevant to their future lives. 

Student pairs are given 10 minutes to create the biggest box possible using one piece of construction paper. Teams use only scissors and tape to each construct a box and determine how much puffed rice it can hold. Then, to meet the challenge, they improve their designs to create bigger boxes. They plot the class data, comparing measured to calculated volumes for each box, seeing the mathematical relationship. They discuss how the concepts of volume and design iteration are important for engineers. Making 3-D shapes also supports the development of spatial visualization skills. This activity and its associated lesson and activity all employ volume and geometry to cultivate seeing patterns and understanding scale models, practices used in engineering design to analyze the effectiveness of proposed design solutions.

This is a lesson on finding the difference between an implicit and explicit function and finding the derivative of functions implicitly. It also covers finding the equation of a tangent line from a function in implicit form . There are self check throughout the lesson. The text that I use in my calculus class is Larson Calculus 11th edition. This corresponds to chapter 2 section 5 in that text but Implicit Differentiation is a common topic in any Calculus I or AP Calculus course.

Series of resources about the carbon cycle  with an accompanying assessment at the end.  

This lesson consists of a basic introduction to the cardiovascular and respiratory system(s) along with basic (common) diseases within each system. Diseases include atherosclerosis, heart attack, stroke, COPD (emphysema, chronic bronchitis). Screenings to detect various forms of cardiovascular disease are also included at an introductory level.