STEM Lesson Plans

Students will explore bird habitats and research how natural and human-caused changes to habitats or climate can impact populations. They will participate in an engineering design challenge to model a

Students design and engineer a paper backpack to hold all the supplies swallowed by the well-loved old lady in "There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Books". They follow the engineering design

Students will work in groups to research and ecosystem and create 3D food chains which will then be connected to create a food web. This allows students to work on finding appropriate sources online

Students will learn about the difference between potential and kinetic energy by building a ramp. Three objects will be tested down the ramp to see which one can go the farthest. Data will be

In this four-day lesson, students will be assigned a specific pollinator. They will research the pollinator and the plants which it pollinates. Then, they will create a puppet and props to model the

This lesson will develop an awareness of the critical importance of access to clean water for survival in the wilderness, drawing inspiration from the book "Hatchet." Students will recognize the vital

In this lesson, students focus on the engineering design process to help them design, build, and test a functional bow and arrow system like the character Brian Robeson in the book "Hatchet". Students

After completing a unit on weather, students will be challenged to research, design, construct and attach a snow plow to their Edison robot. Then they will create a scratch code that will navigate

This is a great opportunity to show students that coding can be a lot of fun, and it doesn’t have to be scary. Many high school students with little to no prior coding experience often automatically

This lesson introduces the students to what are antibiotics, how they work, and why they are important. At the same time, it also talks about how an organism becomes antibiotic resistant. The students

This 45-minute lesson uses the book, "How to Catch an Elf", to lead into a cooperative engineering design lesson where students work in teams to build a humane trap to capture an elf.

This is the second part of this unit on the duff layer in a forest. After learning after duff and its potential impact on forest fires in the last lesson, students will be following the engineering

In this lesson students will use everything they've done in parts 1-3 to analyze how mutations affect proteins. Students will build the mutated proteins that they sequenced in part 3. They will test

In this lesson, students will be introduced to mutations in DNA. They will create beaded or illustrated "codes" to represent 5 different mutations to their original protein codes. These codes will be

In this lesson students will continue to learn about protein synthesis. At the beginning of this lesson students should know that genes have the code to make proteins. Today they will be introduced to

In this lesson students are introduced to the idea that DNA is the code to create proteins and that proteins can be structural or functional. Students are given a problem to create a model of a

This lesson gives students a hands-on science and math experience with the duff layer in a ponderosa pine forest. Students will explore a sample to identify what is found in it, measure the width of

This lesson is PART 4 of a four-lesson unit, which focuses on futures thinking, the phenomenon of electricity, closed-system agriculture, and water as a renewable energy resource. “The City of Ember”

This lesson is PART 3 of a four-lesson unit, which focuses on futures thinking, the phenomenon of electricity, closed-system agriculture, and water as a renewable energy resource. “The City of Ember”

This lesson is PART 2 of a four-lesson unit, which focuses on futures thinking, the phenomenon of electricity, closed-system agriculture, and water as a renewable energy resource. “The City of Ember”

This lesson is PART 1 of a four-lesson unit, which focuses on futures thinking, the phenomenon of electricity, closed-system agriculture, and water as a renewable energy resource. “The City of Ember”

This lesson is a 3-4 day lesson on Public Service Announcements for reusing commonly discarded item versus trashing them. The lessons include the power of a Public Service Announcement, components to

This is a multi-day engineering design project. I use this for 2 weeks, a total of ten 50-minute periods. Students will research and design a dog house, creating a 3D model in a web-based computer

This lesson is designed around competition. Competition is a driving force behind natural selection. If something can survive to reproduce, the traits are passed on. Students will be completing