STEM Lesson Plans

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 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

In this lesson plan, students will be able to investigate battery cells as they construct their own simple batteries: They will know that batteries are a common store of energy for many devices that

By the end of this lesson, students will understand the unique adaptations of desert tortoises and the importance of conserving their habitat. Students also engineer a habitat for the desert tortoise.

Student teams design insulated beverage cups with the challenge to test them to determine which material works best as an insulator to keep a hot beverage warm for as long as possible. Students test

In this engaging and interactive lesson, students explore adaptation and creative problem-solving. Inspired by "The Great Turkey Race," students will engage in a hands-on engineering lesson to design

This lesson is an activity to show how projectile motion and many other motions in nature fallow a parabolic curve. Students will manipulate that knowledge and analyze data using small play tanks to

Using the book "Those Darn Squirrels" by Adam Rubin, students will design and create a bird feeder to let the birds IN and keep the squirrels OUT! Communication, collaboration, and creativity are key

Using the engineering design process, students will collaborate to plan and build a tower...but not just any old tower! This "Tower with a Twist" has to include a suspended cup that can also hold

This lesson takes two days or class periods since it is an exploration of energy in the lives of the students. Day 1 involves 8 different scenarios. Day 2 is an exploration of how efficient two

This is the second part of two lessons on density. This lesson is on the density of liquids following the first lesson on density of solids. The lesson is a lab on layering several liquids with

This lesson is on density of solids. It's one lesson of two. This lesson should be first since it introduces density but it can be revised and used after the density of liquids. The lesson has a short

In this high school science/engineering lesson on exploring cracked steel, students will delve into the concept of cracked steel and its impact on structural integrity. They will define composites and

This lesson is about the rock cycle. Students will start by cutting and folding paper crystals. Then students review what they already know about rocks and the rock cycle. They use their understanding

Students will discover the many different facets of building a business including product research, marketing, finances, cost and profit analysis, product design and more.

Students will be able to understand proportional relationships with rescaling a drawing. Students will be able to draw a reduced scale drawing and enlarged scale drawing in the end. Students will also

In this lesson, first-grade students will explore the concept of resource sharing in nature using dioramas. The lesson is designed to help students understand that living things, such as plants and

Lesson Description: In this first-grade lesson, we will learn about the amazing world of spiders! We'll start by exploring the life cycle of a spider, from when it hatches to how it grows and changes

Students play a game to model and graph the effects an invasive species on a local ecosystem before analyzing a case study and completing a research project.

Students will build an ice snowman and a house for him to live in. They will collaborate to design a structure to keep him from melting. This project uses basic materials to study insulation and

In this lesson, students will work in small groups of 3-4 to design and engineer a manipulative or activity designed to help practice simplifying expressions. Creative designs for the manipulative

In this lesson students will demonstrate their deeper understanding of how the concept of slope is applied to the real-world construction of the wheelchair access ramp. Students will use the knowledge

As an intro to Thermal Energy, students are challenged to create a warmer that will keep my coffee warm. Students project will be tested in class, data will be collected, compared, and graphed.

Methane emissions are far more potent then CO2 emissions in the short-run in the atmosphere yet this is rarely covered in the media. Students will create a multi-media public service campaign to cover