ALEX Lesson Plan Resources

ALEX Lesson Plans  
Subject: Science (5)
Title: Food for Life
Description: Students will discover how plants, animals, and fungi are all interconnected in a giant web.  They will construct a model of a food chain to explain that energy in animals' food is used to sustain life.  They will also acknowledge that all food chains start with energy from the sun. This lesson results from the ALEX Resource Gap Project.

Subject: English Language Arts (5), or Science (5)
Title: Pass the Solar Energy, Please!
Description: Students know that humans and other animals must eat food to have the energy to grow, maintain body temperature, heal, and move, but do they realize that all the energy in food was once energy from the sun? In this lesson, students will participate in a simulation regarding the transfer of energy from the sun to plants, the conversion of solar energy into chemical energy during photosynthesis, and the transfer of energy between organisms when one organism eats another.  Then they will use websites, close reading of nonfiction passages, and vocabulary-building activities to prepare them to construct their own models of the transfer of energy in a food chain to show that energy in animals' food was once energy from the sun.