Elementary / First grade
First grade
Plant + Algae = Total Photosynthesis for the Earth
First grade is where children start noticing that young things look like their parents without being copies of them, and that you can send light through something and watch what comes out the other side. Two lessons here land on first grade standards. Neither one needs a worksheet to work, and both run in short daily blocks.
What standards are covered
What light does when it hits something clear, cloudy, or solid
In plain words: Children plan and run their own test to find out what happens to a beam of light when it meets objects that let all of it through, some of it through, or none of it through.
Lesson: What Green Water Does to Light.
Condition: The class has to write the plan. If you hand out a finished procedure, the planning part is gone and so is the standard. Let them argue about what to test first.
Young animals look like their parents, but not exactly
In plain words: Children use evidence to show that young plants and animals resemble their parents while still being different from them, and from each other.
Lesson: My Pet Brainy Briny Family. Brine shrimp hatch with one eye and grow into adults with three, so the difference between young and adult is sitting in the jar instead of in a textbook drawing.
You need light to see an object
In plain words: Objects can only be seen when light shines on them or when they give off light of their own.
Status: The document itself calls this one a stretch, and we agree with it. The green water lesson brushes against it but does not build a clean test for it. Treat it as a bonus, not as your evidence.
If there is no first grade standard for it, it is not on this page
Why: Plenty of our lessons run well in a first grade room, but their standard sits in another year. Listing them here would make your planning harder, not easier.
Where they are: On the other grade pages, in the bar further down.
Check the grades either side of this one
Why: Both states introduce some of these ideas a year ahead of NGSS or a year behind, so a lesson filed under a neighbouring grade here can be exactly on grade in a Texas or Florida classroom.
On every lesson: The NGSS, Texas and Florida codes are printed on the cover page.
Lessons
Lessons for the First Grade Classroom
What Green Water Does to Light
Standard: 1-PS4-3, what light does when it meets clear water, cloudy water, and something solid.
What happens: A flashlight, a jar of tap water, a jar of green algae water, and a piece of card. The class decides what to test and in what order and writes it down before anyone picks up the flashlight. The green water is the interesting one, because some light gets through and some does not.
Document: ARS-K2-BBE-003, the kindergarten to second grade version. Word file.
My Pet Brainy Briny Family
Standard: 1-LS3-1, young animals look like their parents but are not identical to them.
What happens: A speck in a packet that does nothing at all until it lands in salt water. Six weeks of feeding an animal that hatches with one eye and ends up with three, with a radish growing alongside it from seed to flower to seed.
Document: ARS-K5-BBE-006, one document covering kindergarten through fifth grade. Word file.
Free downloads
Downloads and where to go next
There is one document per lesson. The teacher material and the answer keys come first, then the student pages sit behind an orange PRINT FROM HERE divider, so you can print from that page on. There is one Administrator Guide for the whole of elementary, and that is the one to hand a principal or a curriculum director. Everything is free and editable whether or not you buy a kit.