Snakes Lesson Plans

What do snakes do in winter? They sleep. When the ground begins to warm up, snakes begin to move, making snakes an important sign of spring. For a seasonal study, or any time, try some science-based lessons on snakes. This study really lends itself to the use of video, and we’ve included several at different levels of complexity. This study can be a good opportunity to explore different aspects of visual literacy, since it uses graphic organizers, charts, diagrams, and video, as well as written text and discussion.

Ask students to list scary animals. Chances are, snakes will be included in the list. Prepare a KWL Chart that expresses what students believe about snakes. Some of the ideas they may have:

• Snakes are slimy.
• Snakes are always poisonous.
• Snakes attack people.
• Snakes are scary.

Students may also know facts about snakes. Include all they know or believe on the K (things we know) section of the chart.

Help students list what they want to know on the W (things we want to know) chart. Leave the chart up while the class undertakes some research.

Classification

If you haven’t studied classification before, use our pasta sorting video to introduce the idea:

You can also download the PowerPoint. With the idea of classification clearly in mind, explain that all living things have been officially classified in a particular way. Nature in Your Own Backyard has a clear chart, and Trend makes a great scientific classification chart for your bulletin board.

Now, how are snakes classified?

Have students use classroom computers or resource books to find the answers to these questions:

1. Are snakes plants or animals? (Students should all know that snakes are animals; if there are uncertainties, ask whether snakes can move.)
2. Do snakes have spines? (Students may need to research this question, but should conclude that snakes are vertebrates.)
3. Are snakes mammals or reptiles? (Students can discover this by researching whether snakes are warm blooded — no; whether snakes have live babies — no, they lay eggs; whether snakes have fur or hair — no. Snakes are reptiles.)

Older students can learn that snakes are members of the order Squamata, which includes lizards and snakes, and the suborder Serpentes, which includes all snakes.

Movement

Snakes move on land in the same way that fish move in water, with a side-to-side movement of their spines. In a way, snakes swim on land. See a simple look at snake movement:

Or a more complex discussion of some fascinating scientific and mathematical research:

Learn more about snakes’ movements:

• How Stuff Works has a nice explanation of how snakes’ morphology (the way they’re shaped and put together) connects with their movements.
• Wilderness College adds snake tracks to the discussion.
• Limbless Locomotion discusses ways in which snakelike motion could be beneficial (and possible) for robots. This is not an easy read, but should be intriguing for high school students, and classes which have studied robotics.

Have students try out the various movements of snakes, either as whole body movement or with ropes (one student can hold each end of the rope and they can cooperatively try to replicate the movements).

Compare snakes’ movements with the movements of mammals and other animals. Robert Full’s TED talk on animal locomotion is another great video to share.

As a class, discuss how morphology (shape, form) affects the behavior of animals.

Now it’s time to fill out the L (what we’ve learned) section of the chart. Check the W section and see if there are questions remaining. If so, have students continue researching till their curiosity is satisfied.

Have students revisit the things they “knew” about snakes. Were there some misconceptions? Do students feel more or less positive about snakes now that they know more?

Healthy Kids Lesson Plans

President Kennedy said that physical fitness is not only important for physical health, but that it is also “the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity.” Still, we know that many of our students (and maybe even some of us) aren’t making the lifestyle choices that lead to optimum health and fitness. Try a lesson that looks at some of those choices.

This lesson begins with infograpics. You might want to start with our Infographics Lesson Plans, using the health-related infographics offered here as the starting point.

Start by printing or projecting this infographic and sharing it with your class:

Brought to you by MAT@USC Masters in Teaching

Discuss the infographic and list the facts your class finds surprising. Did they realize that so few kids eat vegetables and exercise? Did they know that babies drink soda? Were they aware of the consequences of these lifestyle choices?

Check out a few more infographics on kids and health:

• School lunches and nutrition
• Vegetables and Physical Activity (not for kids especially, but these are probably the most important changes kids can make)
• Changing eating patterns
• Balanced meals
• Fruit drinks

Divide the class into four groups. Ask each group to come up with a healthy change they’d be willing to make. Examples:

• Cutting out soda
• Using the new MyPlate system
• Having 4-6 servings of vegetables every day
• Getting 30 minutes of activity every day
• Cutting out candy

If you have students who are not ready to make changes, ask them to serve as the control group for the class study.

Determine as a class how you’ll measure the difference in each group’s health. All groups must use the same metric for accuracy. Possibilities:

• Number of school days missed because of illness
• Perceived energy levels (have students write how great they feel, from 1 to 10, on a slip of paper each day at the same time and collect the slips for each group in a jar)
• Heart rate tests before and after the study

Give each group a box with a slit in the top, like a piggy bank. Every day, students should anonymously write “Yes, did it” or “No, not today” and put their slip into the box. This will allow you to determine whether the groups made their planned changes or not. If the majority of the slips say “no,” then that group can’t be said to have made their change.

Hve your class continue with their changes for three weeks. Encourage students, share news about fitness and health, and keep up with any measurements you planned on during the study. At the end of the three weeks, analyze the data:

• Count “yes” and “no” slips for each group, and eliminate any group that has a majority of “no” slips.
• Take and count the agreed upon measures for all the groups.
• Compare the group results.
• Create your own class chart, infographic, or other presentation about the results of your study.

21 days is long enough to creatre a habit. Discuss with the students whether they plan to keep up with the change now that the study is over.

FreshPlans Visits a Grist Mill

…a what? Long ago, millers were very important people in any village. A mill would take the grain farmers grew and grind it into flour or meal so people could bake with it.This essential step in the progression from raw materials to finished goods makes a good lesson in economics, and the mill wheel itself is a great start for a look at energy or force and motion. Of course, this is also a good history lesson.

War Eagle Mill was built in 1832 to serve the needs of pioneers in our area. It is one of the few pioneer era grist mills still working today, and we feel fortunate to be able to visit and see how grains used to be made into flour in the past. We’re also glad War Eagle Mill still operates today, because this old fashioned method makes for very delicious baking.

Without a mill, people had to grind up grains themselves. Where we live, this would usually have been corn. War Eagle Mill shows the tools people used, and even lets people try them out.

Kids can use a stone to grind different types of corn so they can discover the differences among the different types. They’ll also discover what hard work it was to grind up enough to feed the family!

The grinding stone has a bowl in it where the stone has been worn away by the grinding, and of course that means that very small particles of stone ended up in the meal or flour, increasing the mineral content. When we visited the Ancient Village at the Cherokee Cultural Center, we saw (and posted a photo for you) the other type of grinding tool: a hollowed log with a wooden stick. This took more muscle power, but leverage helped. Have students try grinding dried corn with different kinds of tools to compare the effects. An ordinary kitchen morter and pestle is an easy option.

A 19th century mill like the War Eagle would use a millstone like this one to grind the meal, and the grinding was powered not by human strength but by water. This is how it’s still done at the War Eagle Mill today.

The grain would go down through the pipes into the mill, and the stones would be turned by the machinery you can see above. The machinery was in turn powered by the mill wheel. Again, this is still how War Eagle Mill mills grains.

Water from War Eagle creek is caught in the paddles of the wheel and turns the wheel. Since it is attached to the mill inside the building, the mill wheel makes the mill turn, and grinds the grain. You can easily make a model water wheel in the classroom, and this is also a good time to look at gears. We like WaterHistory.org’s page on the history of water wheels for the science connection. In fact, lessons on energy fit in very well here.

The mill wheel works the same way that the paddle wheel on a boat like the Steamboat Arabia works. The mill race has a lot of power from the movement of the water, and the mill harnesses that power and uses it.

Modern mills usually use electricity to run their mills, and their mills are quite different from War Eagle, but the principle is the same. Grains like corn and wheat are ground up into flour so that they can be used for baking. War Eagle has jars of different grains, including quinoa and other grains that are newer to us, and the flours and meals they can be milled into.

They take those grains and meals and bake them into traditional foods like cornbread, pies, and cinnamon rolls which you can eat upstairs in their restaurant.

They also have displays of artifacts from their history there. On the day we visited, there was a lady who had been born in 1926 having beans and cornbread at the mill, and she told us all about how she had used similar items as a child. We’re not children, but we might not have been able to guess the purposes of all the objects we saw, so we were glad to have the information.

At War Eagle Mill, you can buy flour and meal and things like that, so we brought some home to use for our Thanksgiving baking. In the picture below, you can see some things we still use today: flour and meal ground in the traditional way at the grist mill, my grandmother’s cookbook from the 1940s, my great-grandmother’s dough bowl hand carved for kneading bread dough, and her hand carved rolling pin for rolling out pie crusts.

For young children, just seeing how things were long ago can be very intriguing. Many urban children have no idea where bread comes from, besides the grocery store. Following grains from the farm to the table is a good study for elementary school students, and middle school and high school students should be ready to consider how automation of grinding would impact the lives and work of the pioneers. In our region, this would include both European American settlers traveling West from the colonies and Cherokee settlers taking up more modern technology. Bring in your region’s local history as well — chances are, the transition from home grinding to the use of a grist mill took place where you live, too.

Renaissance Lesson Plans

“Renaissance” in French means “rebirth,” and the Renaissance was a time of rebirth for the arts and sciences. Signs of Renaissance began in Italy in the 14th century, and the time period is generally agreed to extend to the 17th century.

There is of course overlap between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Begin with your classroom timeline and map and have students decide where and in which places to mark the beginning of the Renaissance. Here are questions they can use:

• Who were some important people of the Renaissance, and when did they live?
• What were some important discoveries of the Renaissance, and when did they take place?
• What were some important ideas of the Renaissance, who wrote about them, and when?

The Renaissance didn’t happen in only one place, but some parts of the world participated more than others in the rebirth of art and science. Have students explore the Renaissance in different places:

• Compare the Italian Renaissance with the Northern Renaissance of the Netherlands and Flanders. Students might begin by looking at Rembrandt, born in the Netherlands in 1606, in comparison to Michelangelo,  born in Italy in 1475. Enjoy a virtual tour of Rembrandt’s house and of Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel (virtual tours are a a good way to work on panning and zooming).
• France was strongly influenced by the Italian Renaissance in the 15th century, and later by the Northern Renaissance as well. France in turn strongly influenced England, where the Renaissance was marked by Queen Elizabeth I and Shakespeare, and by enormous religious, political, and economic upheaval. In both France and England, the Renaissance centered more on literature and music than on painting and sculpture. Compare the French and English Renaissance experience with that of Italy and the Netherlands.
• Art was a guiding force of the Renaissance, but science and technology were equally affected by the changes in the world, and may have had a greater effect on the lives of the people. Have students add to the class timeline as many inventions of the Renaissance as they can find, beginning with the printing press, the telescope, and the thermometer. Have students look at the life of a man of art and science, Leonardo da Vinci. Compare the scientists of the Renaissance with modern scientists.
• The Pilgrims came to America during the Renaissance, but their culture wasn’t focused on art, science, or technology. Compare the Pilgrims and the Native Americans with whom they lived with the European Renaissance.
• Center in on the year 1600 and compare Europe with the Americas, Asia, and Africa. While you can make a four way Venn diagram, the simplest way is to divide the class into three parts and have each group create a Venn diagram comparing one of the other continents with Europe. Once each group has reported to the class, consider putting together a hug four-way Venn diagram for your bulletin board, surrounding it with the small group diagrams.

Our lesson plans on the subject:

• Galileo Lesson Plans
• Shakespeare Lesson Plans

Other online resources:

• History.com on the Italian Renaissance
• The Renaissance Connection
• Learner.org on the Renaissance

Medieval Warfare Physics Lesson Plans

Our society values peace highly, but our students still find medieval fighting pretty cool. Take advantage of the taste for mayhem by learning some science lessons from the fighters of the Middle Ages.

Here is Mark Morley, a physics teacher from Heritage High School in Rogers, Arkansas, and a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. More than 30,000 members of this group reenact Medieval life and battles. Mark explained to us how he gets his students excited about physics by getting medieval in the classroom.

Armor

Mark’s armor is very heavy, as was that of the French knights in the 14th century whose role he plays in medieval reenactments.

The reason his helmet has to be so heavy? When a knight was hit in the head, the energy used by his opponent to thwack his helmet was transferred to the surface of the helmet. The energy caused the helmet to move, and to keep moving until the movement was stopped either by the strength of the knight, by the ground if he fell, or by the extent of movement possible for the neck if he remained standing. The neck could become overextended and snap back, describing the S curve we call “whiplash.” The brain inside the knight’s skull would also be moving, and it might continue moving after the skull stopped, becoming squashed against the skull.

While the initial movement of the knight’s head is caused by the force of the opponent’s blow, gravity takes over once the knight begins to fall, and the movement will accelerate at a rate of about 32 feet per second per second — that is, each second of the fall, the knight moves faster by 32 feet per second compared with his speed in the previous second.

Unless the knight who was hit was able to stop the movement of his helmet by his own strength, it was very likely that he would injure his neck, or that his brain would hit against the bone of his skull and receive brain injury.

A heavy object and a light object dropped at the same time will reach the ground at the same time (see resources on this in our Galileo lesson plans), but it takes more force to move a heavy object in the first place. Therefore, a heavier helmet will be less likely to be moved by an opponent’s blow at a speed which the knight cannot counteract with his muscles.

Mark has very strong neck muscles, after all his years of fighting in armor.We don’t recommend experiments with real helmets and heads in your classroom. However, we created an experiment that examines the physics topic:

• Knights We made the knights for the experiment from water bottles topped with “helmets” of different weights, from a paper cup to a small cast iron saucepan.
• Opponents In order to get as close as possible to uniform force, we had students throw balls rather than directly hitting. We easily determined that it took a great deal more force to move a heavy helmet than a light one. Please let us know if you find a means of gaining greater precision.

 

An alternative might be to discuss this matter of helmets and then listen to a podcast on weight of armor. The speaker concludes that the weight of the armor was a drawback that made plate armor a bad choice. The History Channel video linked below says that it’s not the weight but the heat that is an issue with armor. Have students conduct research and decide whether the weight of armor was necessary or a design flaw.

Online resources:

• Extensive background information about armor and weapons, and the interaction between the two
• The History Channel examines medieval armor
• An interesting (though science-free) art project for knights in armor.

We had the opportunity to speak with the man who made Mark’s armor, Andy Ward. He makes most of the armor with a hammer and anvil, in the same way armorers in the Middle Ages would have done. However, he also has a hydraulic press for speeding up fancy work. Andy made the hydraulic press himself, and hydraulics is another interesting physics topic.

Trebuchet

I have a large trebuchet in my back yard, from the Trebuchet Physics summer program my son went to a few years back. His team didn’t win the trebuchet toss for speed or distance, but they got lots of points for style, and the trebuchet allowed them to dominate snowball fights in the neighborhood.

It also gave them excellent insights into physics.

In spite of our direct experience, we found that Try Engineering has such a good trebuchet lesson plan that we are not tempted to make a new one. If you don’t want to do the building, you can also have a look at energy transfer with Nova’s Trebuchet Energy Transfer video lesson. You can also read a simple explanation of the physics of the trebuchet.

More weapons

We found a couple of other interesting things online:

• a webquest for high school students
• a siege engine page if you enjoyed the trebuchet and want to extend the experience

We cannot think of any point in the study of force and motion that can’t be illustrated with medieval weaponry. Check out our page of Middle Ages Lesson Plans if you’d like to flesh out the subject a bit.

Galileo Lesson Plans

Galileo Galilei was an astronomer, mathematician and physicist who is sometimes called the Father of Modern Science because of his use of observation and experimentation, which we now call the scientific method. We’d like to share with you some of our favorite lesson plans for learning about the life and work of this important man.

Galileo was born in Pisa on 15 February 1564 and lived in Pisa, Padua, and Florence until his death on 8 January 1642. During his lifetime, he made a number of discoveries and experiments in different fields, but it is probably his work in the philosophy of science that has been most important over time.

The life and work of Galileo

Begin by adding Galileo to your classroom timeline in the year of his birth. You can also add other events from Galileo’s life. We like to use a paper cutout for each important person on our timeline, with the name, dates, and place of each person’s life. On the other side of the cutout, have students draw Galileo in the clothing of the time.  We like the statue below, from the Ufizzi Gallery, but students can use an online image search to see paintings and drawings of Galileo, or do general research on the clothing worn during the Italian Renaissance.

Each student can use his or her cut out of Galileo to make a file folder project, as we see in our Heroes lesson plans (we think Galileo belongs in your heroes study too, so check out the ideas there and also in Science Heroes for more activities). Students can use graphic organizers and illustrations to show the things they learn about Galileo, and they can also add pockets to hold written reports, or staple a more formal paper into the folder.

With a nice collection of mini presentation board projects, you can create a display on the life and times of Galileo in your classroom.

Some of the things you might like to include in your study:

• Galileo’s father, a musician and composer, was the first person to prove that the pitch of a string varies as the square root of the tension. This was not exactly new information. since people had been tuning stringed instruments by the Pythagorean system for centuries by then. However, Vincenzo Galilei was the first to do the experiments which showed the math and physics clearly. Galileo brought the same scientific approach to other topics.
• One of the areas in which Galileo was most influential was in materials science, the study of how different materials behave. Another is in the study of motion. A famous experiment combined the two topics. Aristotle, a Greek philosopher, had claimed that objects fell at speeds related to their weight. A light object would therefore fall more slowly than a heavy one. Galileo tested this claim and found that it was false. The story is that Galileo dropped a one pound weight and a ten pound weight at the same time from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to check the claim. Read more about this at the Physics Hypertext and try the experiment with instructions from The Exploratorium. The point, in terms of Galileo’s life, is that he made the experiment in a controlled way. Before Galileo, people had already noticed that Aristotle was wrong, but it was Galileo who prepared a controlled experiment to prove it.
• Galileo made important improvements to the telescope which allowed him to see a new star, to track the phases of Venus (as our moon has phases that make it appear to have a different shape, so does Venus), and to become very sure that the earth went around the sun and not the other way around. Copernicus had already said this, but Galileo was very dedicated to making it known to the general public. It’s difficult to do astronomical observation with a telescope in school (not dark enough), but Science Netlinks has a lesson on telescopes which focuses on the scientific method.
• Galileo got into trouble with the Inquisition in 1633, even though he was a devout Catholic and a friend of the Pope, and ended his life under house arrest. When FreshPlans went to Rome, we had the opportunity to visit an exhibit on this interesting part of Galileo’s life at the Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels and the Martyrs, an extremely beautiful church designed in part by Michelangelo and built on the Diocletian Baths, an enormous bathhouse of Ancient Rome. The photo at the beginning of this post shows the dome of the basilica, designed in honor of Galileo, and we have a little slideshow below that shows some other parts of the church, including a statue of Galileo designed by a Chinese artist in the 21st century. In 2000, Pope John Paul II publicly expressed regret for the condemnation of Galileo, but there is still a surprising amount of controversy — not about whether the earth moves around the sun, but about what the Galileo Affair tells us about the relationship between science and religion. Have older students research “the Galileo Affair” and write about it. We would have them include both sources from the Catholic church and from the scientific community, because both groups have interesting things to say on the subject, but you know your community best.

The book Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei by Peter Sis is a wonderful and accessible book about Galileo for kids.

Galileo was a fine writer, and his books were very influential. Perhaps even more influential were letters that he wrote; they were shared publicly in the same way that we might now share a really good Facebook post. We haven’t found any versions of Galileo’s works that will be readable for students, but you might like to read The Essential Galileo for background. Quotes from Galileo:

“The universe cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word.”

“Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.”

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”

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