Grades 3 through 5
Energy from the Sun
Tracing energy from a classroom window into an animal, one step at a time.
All of it starts at the sun. Algae catches sunlight and stores it as food. A brine shrimp that eats algae is really taking in stored sunlight, and anything that eats the shrimp takes in that same energy one step further along. Nothing in the bag made energy. It only moved, and some was lost at every step.
How the lab meets it
What students do that satisfies the standard
NGSS 5-PS3-1
Standard: Use models to describe that energy in animals' food was once energy from the sun.
What the kit does: The Secchi readings make the first half of that sentence measurable. Light comes through the window, the algae gets denser, and the numbers climb. Then the readings on the grazed bag fall while the ungrazed bag holds, because the energy the algae banked is moving into the shrimp. Students end the week holding a graph of sunlight turning into an animal.
Texas 3.9.B
Standard: Identify and describe the flow of energy in a food chain, beginning with the sun.
What the kit does: Beginning with the sun is the hard part in most classrooms, because the sun is abstract and the food chain is a poster. Here the chain is two links long and both of them are alive on the windowsill. A third grader can point at where the energy entered and follow it one step. Texas teaches this two years before NGSS.
Florida SC.4.L.17.3
Standard: Trace the flow of energy from the sun as it is transferred along a food chain.
What the kit does: Florida gives energy tracing its own code, separate from the food chain itself, so the emphasis falls on the tracing. That is exactly what the two line graph is. One line is energy being captured, the other is energy being eaten, and the gap between them opening across the week is the transfer.
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Our Lesson Plans
Each lesson is one Word file. Teacher pages and answer keys first, then the student pages behind the orange PRINT FROM HERE divider.
What Eats Light? Grades 3 to 5
What it covers: Sun to algae to shrimp, with the Secchi readings across seven days that turn the handoff into a graph.
How it is built: One Word file. Teacher notes and answer keys up front, then the student pages behind the orange PRINT FROM HERE divider.
Administrator Guide
One guide for the whole elementary program rather than one per lesson. This is the copy to hand a principal or a curriculum director.
All the elementary lesson plans
Every elementary lesson plan sitting in one folder, if you would rather take the whole set at once.