Middle School Lesson Plans

Kurtis Smith and Dave Massey, Santee Alternative
Santee School District

An application of how magnetism and electricity are related, students observe the spinning of a coil of copper wire that is part of a circuit powered by a battery and attached to a spindle positioned over a magnet and are ask to discuss why the mechanism works in the manner that it does.

By Linda Gregory, Urbita Elementary School, San Bernardino City Unified School District, CA.
In this lesson, students in grades K-6 learn an easy technique to measure the presence of drafts in their homes and classrooms. In Worm Warmers, a follow-up lesson to Draft-o-meter, students create draft guards to help reduce energy waste.

By the Green Schools team at Fortuna Middle School, Fortuna Union Elementary School District, CA
In this lesson, students in grade 8 use the scientific method to examine school lighting technologies and determine if there are opportunities to save energy and money.

By David Casey, Analy High School, West Sonoma County Union High School District, CA
In this lesson, developed by a Green Schools teacher, students grades 8-12 increase their awareness of the impact of their choices on the Earth by studying the ecological footprint concept. They also learn how to calculate the mean, median, mode, and standard deviation of a set of data.

In this activity, students will investigate the patterns of heat (radiation, conduction, convection) in the classroom and learn how windows affect a room's comfort. Also, students will find out how to treat windows from the inside to make them more energy efficient.

In this lesson, students will determine the wattage & kWh of various household appliances and identify potential ways to conserve energy.

This activity allows student to become building inspectors, identifying features that can help or hurt energy conservation.

In this activity, students will learn about renewable and nonrenewable sources of energy and display this knowlege on a graphic organizer. Also, students will investigate how much fossil fuel we have and how much we use.

In this activity, students will discover the number and kinds of appliances they have their homes today, and compare this information with the appliances an adult had in his/her home a generation ago. This comparison should help students understand the important role that energy plays in their life, and why energy demand has increased so much in the last twenty years.

In this lesson, students will learn how much energy is found in each kind of fossil fuel, describe the various units used to measure the energy content of fossil fuels, and convert these energy units from one unit to another.

This lesson engages students in a hands-on experiment where they observe and explain a demonstration of the reaction of acid precipitation on different materials. Then, they predict possible environmental effects of acid rain.

Students will learn how to evaluate energy-related purchases in terms of cost-effectivness, utilizing concepts such as "payback" and "rate of return."

Students will identify several fuels, their uses, the devices that convert fuel into another form of energy, and students will recognize that some energy is wasted during the fuel conversion process.