Science Education Idea Exchange

I love using phenomena in my lesson plans!  I have heard it called similar names  like  discrepant events, anchors, and engagement  to name a few . In my search for ideas, I found this website,  The Wonder of Science . They have done all the hard work of gathering videos and ideas . Their website is categorized by age and type of science. They even have created a master list of the website phenomena. Pair this with my freebie  NGSS lesson planning template  and you're ready  to go ! Photo by  Alex  on  Unsplash

I created lesson plans for the MS-LS1-3  on my Teachers Pay Teachers. I start the objective off with a couple phenomenon over things I think students will find to be crazy: regeneration and beating heart cells. My hope is that both will help students to make connections between cells and the body systems they create. The lesson plans continue on with a web quest (answer key is provided to teachers) to help students learn the terminology and examples of each of the levels of organization. Finally, there are two assessments to check student understanding. The first is called a critical thinking question. I ask an open-ended question that students can research. The question is not easy enough that they can simply Google the answer. They have to formulate a response based on what we learned in class and what they can find online.  The second assessment is a project completed over an assigned disease or disorder. Students find it fascinating to talk about what can go wrong w...