This Spring, we’ve been developing some new BASIS Lessons! Read all about them here!
Every year our volunteers develop a handful of new lessons to add to our BASIS lesson library. We particularly enjoy working with our volunteers to develop these lessons because the subject matter is often a reflection of the volunteer’s own interests and passions for a particular science or engineering topic. We’re always amazed how our volunteers can take what they do in the lab, museum, or field and package them into fun K-5 classroom hands-on experiences for students.
This year we’ve had several volunteers develop some really engaging lessons that we’re particularly excited about!
• All About Volcanoes (2nd grade)
Students play a volcano eruption game with Play-Doh to discover the way volcanoes dynamically grow and change over time. Then they compare grey and red eruptions using some in-classroom models and demonstrations!
• Smell Me If You Can! How Insects Communicate (4th grade)
Each student pretends to be an ant and using only their sense of smell, they must find the other members of their colony! Students learn about insect pheromones and understand how one tiny ant kitchen invader can quickly turn into an ant infestation!
• Eye See It: Understanding How Eyes See (1st grade)
Look into the eyes of your friends and a variety of other animals. What are some similarities? What are the differences? Students participate in three hands-on activities to understand the structure and function of eyes, our reliance on the sense of sight, and the role light plays in our vision!
• Can We See Your DNA? (5th grade)
Why does an apple seed always turn into an apple tree? Where are the instructions located? In this newly developed lesson, students use their own bodies to represent DNA base pairs and work with other students to model how DNA replicates inside our cells! Students then extract DNA from bananas to practice taking accurate measurements and making careful observations – they also create a DNA necklace at the end of the lesson so they can share what they learned with other students!
We also try to tailor our lessons to our volunteer interests. The Port of Oakland is one of our newest private industry partners to join BASIS. We thought a bit about what the Port does and the kind of science the employees are engaged in every day. So we took one of our older lessons “Buoyancy: Who Sank the Boat?”, updated it to align with NGSS standards, and trained the Port of Oakland employees so that they can now teach kindergartners about boats, forces, and buoyancy!