Hello everyone, Does anyone have good resources/information about creating a unit on electricity? I am currently seeking elementary certification and one of my assignments is to create a unit consisting of three lessons on electricity. It is geared towards fourth graders and my goal is to make it creative, effective, and hands on. I have a few ideas with circuits, conductors, insulators and switches which are all hands on. However, I want to incorporate other subject areas such as reading and writing. Does anyone know of good books/articles that the students could read before hand? Any advice is appreciated! Thank you!
Hi Megan, Bravo on your idea to write creative, engaging, hands-on lessons! The NSTA Learning Center is full of resources that can help you develop lesson plans that meet this goal. The Advanced Search Tool enables you to search by keyword and resource type. You can even filter the search by grade level or resource type. I've also attached a collection of NSTA resources that are 4th Grade Electricity resources. A few of the resources I included are geared toward middle school students, but I modified them to work with 4th graders. Good luck with your lesson plan project! Be sure to post back to let us know how it's going! Maureen
We just finished a unit on energy/electricty and alternative sources of energy. We read aloud from City of Ember, which is all about how the generator is failing and the city is losing light power (it's underground), blackouts occur more and more frequently. The kids spent a lot time researching various forms of alternative energy and it's effect on the environment. This was our main focus of literacy/writing. We learned a great deal about reading informational text, and writing persuasive papers. In science our focus was on procedural/technical writing. The kids would draw models of circuits, and write directions on how to build them. These are all great ways to tie writing to science. You could do some conductor and insulator labs. They could be given a problem to work to solve, like a company would want them to design some sort of device that would conduct electricity over a long distance etc. Just throwing some ideas out there, hope it gives you some ideas. As for articles check out newsela.com
Have you checked out my Squishy Circuit activity?
Squishy_Circuit.docx (0.01 Mb)
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