This video explores the return of buffalo through First Nations sharing and gifts. This is a great resource when exploring Indigenous agriculture and the impact of settlement on Indigenous agriculture.
Students will explore contemporary artist John Baldessari's mixed-media work of art inspired by a 16th-century drawing of a beetle. After writing a story about a bug's journey, each student will create a mixed-media representation of a bug that is inspired by the contemporary artist's work.
"Build It Yourself: Satellite!" is an online Flash game hosted on the James Webb Space Telescope website. The goal of the game is to explain the decision-making process of satellite design. The user can choose to build a "small," "medium," or "large" astronomy satellite. The user then selects science goals, wavelength, instruments, and optics. The satellite is then launched on the appropriate rocket (shown via an animation). Finally, the user is shown what their satellite might look like, as well as what kind of data it might collect, via examples from similar real-life satellites. Satellites range from small X-ray missions without optics (like the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer) to large missions with segmented mirrors (like the James Webb Space Telescope).
The Building Literacy with Technology in Elementary guide provides articles, samples, and lessons to find new ideas and approaches to engage learners in building skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking.
In the Building Literacy with Technology in Elementary guide you will explore:
- Ways to get students making in language arts,
- Take a creative approach to student work with informational text,
- How to motivate students by creating their own comics, cartoons, and graphic novels.
The guide includes lesson plans where students:
- Design a new cover for a book they are reading to demonstrate comprehension and explore character, plot, setting, symbolism, and conflict.
- Create a digital scrapbook that showcases the viewpoint of the main character of a novel.
- Illustrate and translate the meaning of an idiom to help others learn these examples of figurative language.
- Write and produce an animated tall tale about a famous person.
- Explore character, plot, and theme and learn to write persuasively as they develop a movie-style trailer for a book they have read.
- Learn and practice persuasive writing and presentation skills.
- Personify an object and write a story as part of an online book or animated adventure.
- Analyze verse and explore meaning by creating a visual poem.
These articles, lessons, and strategies engage students through creative technology to maximize student literacy skills.
The Building Literacy with Technology in Primary guide provides articles, samples, and lessons to find new ideas and approaches to engage your students in building skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking.
In the Building Literacy with Technology in Primary guide you will explore:
- Engaging new readers and writers with creative technologies
- Using digital storytelling in the primary classroom
- Inspiring every student to be an author
The guide includes lesson plans where students:
- Explore initial sounds through the creation of a classroom ABC book.
- Learn to write using alliteration and create illustrations that support and reflect their writing.
- Practice writing and illustrating as they create a page in your class’s adaptation of their favorite pattern story.
- Write a letter to their parents, or classroom teacher, to persuade them to get a new pet, supporting their opinion with reasons and examples.
- Research an animal and create a riddle to showcase their knowledge and engage other students in the natural world.
- Create a book review on a card or 3D cube to help others choose books they will enjoy.
- Learn about the haiku poetry form and write and illustrate their own haiku poems.
- Write how-to stories about getting ready for school and publish them to share with their families and to use at home.
These articles, lessons, and strategies engage students through creative technology to maximize student literacy skills.
"Thunkable enables anyone to build their own beautiful mobile apps. Using drag and drop code, students can start from scratch or remix a sample app. Created app projects are accessible on both iOS and Android platforms. Thunkable has an active community with regular design challenges to keep students thinking outside the box with their app creations." (AASL)
"With the free version of Thunkable, all app projects are set to public mode. This means that all projects are automatically included in the Thunkable Public Gallery, for anyone to preview and remix. With a PRO membership, you have the ability to create and edit private projects. This means that no one else will have access to your apps." There are paid versions available as well.
In the companion activity, students experimented with Arduino programming to blink a single LED. During this activity, students build on that experience as they learn about breadboards and how to hook up multiple LEDs and control them individually so that they can complete a variety of challenges to create fun patterns! To conclude, students apply the knowledge they have gained to create LED-based light sculptures.
Students design and construct devices to trap insects that are present in the area around the school. The objective is to ask the right design questions and conduct the right tests to determine if the traps work .
Learn how ot make a Mars helicopter model with simple materials.
Student teams creatively construct mobiles using hangers and assorted materials and objects while exploring the principles of balance and center of mass. They build complex, free-hanging structures by balancing pieces with different lengths, weights, shapes and sizes.
Students construct bird nests and birdhouses. They research birds of their choosing and then design houses that meet the birds' specific needs. It works well to conduct this activity in conjunction with a grades 9-12 woodshop class by partnering the older students with the younger students (but it is not required to do this in order to conduct the activity).
Description: Students will explore genes and heredity in the context of beef cattle. They will discover probability and be introduced to beef breeds.
In this hands-on activity, students explore the electrical force that takes place between two objects. Each student builds an electroscope and uses the device to draw conclusions about objects' charge intensity. Students also determine what factors influence electric force.
In this activity, learners consider the requirements for human life beyond Earth's protection: air to breathe, plentiful food, shielding from ultraviolet light, power, etc. They then work in teams to design and construct a model of a space colony out of craft materials that would allow humans to survive the harsh environments of the Moon or Mars. Teams present their modules and colonies to one another and create a display for the library. This activity is part of Explore! To the Moon and Beyond! - developed specifically for use in libraries.
Starting from atoms, see how many molecules you can build. Collect your molecules and see them in 3D!
Learn to build a small habitat for the Moon.
If you build it carefully, this crazy contraption demonstrates one of the basic laws of nature.
Learn shapes and build rockets with paper cut out activity sheets
In this activity, learners build a sextant to measure the altitude, or height above the horizon, of an object. The activity was originally designed to accompany a previous NASA-funded educational program, entitled The Sun in Time.
Motivating a reluctant student to complete schoolwork is not easy. In a typical classroom, students can choose from a number of sources of potential reinforcement (Billington & DiTommaso, 2003)--and academic tasks often take a back seat to competing behaviors such as talking with peers. One way that teachers can increase the attractiveness of schoolwork is by structuring lessons or assignments around topics or activities of high interest to the student (Miller et al., 2003).In fact, with planning, the teacher can set up a 'trap' that uses motivating elements to capture a student's attention to complete academic tasks (Alber & Heward, 1996). Here is a 6-step blue-print for building an academic 'motivation trap' (adapted from Alber & Heward, 1996).