This Classroom Connectors lesson plan teaches young students about plants and how their environment affects their growth. Students learn about factors necessary for plant growth, that different plants require different environments to thrive, and how plants adapt to their environment. The site provides goals, objectives, an outline, time required, materials, activities, and closure ideas for the lesson. ... Full description.

In this lesson, students are given a variety of materials and are asked to design a heat loss experiment that will result in a reasonable explanation of why whales do not have legs. Students will learn that natural selection favors a body design that is energy efficient. Full description.

The intent of this website is to give teachers a background understanding of evolution, opening the door by giving them strategies for teaching and responding to misconceptions and roadblocks. The heart of the site is Evolution 101, which can serve as a primer to evolutionary theory or an intensive course in the nitty gritty details of speciation, micro- and macroevolution, and ongoing research into ... Full description.

This junior biologist site has an endangered species fact sheet and image library as well as student and teacher resources. Computer games include activities for many species and a distance learning adventure focusing on monarch butterflies. Full description.

This radio broadcast features a field trip to a Virginia backyard to study small bugs called tree-hoppers, or vanduzea arquata, with Rex Cocroft, a leading bioacoustic scientist who studies the sounds insects make. Tree-hoppers communicate with sound that travels through the stems of plants. These signals are picked up by an accelerometer that turns them into sound we can hear. The broadcast contains ... Full description.

This lesson is based on an essay by Stephen Jay Gould and on the related reading guide. It addresses the issue of cladistics and some of the problems encountered in the science of Systematics. Students will learn that biological classification is intimately associated with evolution. They will also learn that there are many problems encountered in classification, providing evidence that the living ... Full description.

In this activity, students will dissect a fish purchased from a fish market to study its external and internal anatomy. They will observe its gills, kidney, and blood through a microscope and take a variety of measurements of many of the internal organs. They will practice their observation skills by making accurate illustrations. These data and drawings will then be compared with some Antarctic fishes ... Full description.

In this lesson, each student is given a block of wood and a screw (or nail), and is asked to put the screw into the block, without any tool (like a screwdriver or hammer). Their efforts, with varying success, lead to a discussion of contrivances, using various items and strategies as make-do (contrived) tools for which they were not intended, and an exploration of many examples of contrivances or ... Full description.

In this lab activity, students explore how organisms are able to survive the extreme environmental conditions found in the Polar regions. Students will design experiments using Tardigrades and rotifers to expand their knowledge and understanding of normal behavior followed by experiments to explore anhydrobiosis. Full description.

This Classroom Connectors lesson plan teaches students that adaptations help organisms survive and that adaptation is related to the fitness of an organism. This site provides goals, objectives, an outline, time needed, materials, activities, and closure ideas for the lesson. Classroom Connectors address content with an activity approach while incorporating themes necessary to raise the activity to ... Full description.