Energy Conversions

 What’s in This Unit?

The electrical system, our nation’s network for producing and delivering electricity from suppliers to consumers, is essential to our lives and increasingly in the news. Understanding this critical system provides a unique context for students to learn about how energy is converted from one form to another, how it can be transferred from place to place, and the variety of energy sources that exist.

In the Energy Conversions unit, students take on the role of systems engineers for Ergstown, a fictional town that experiences frequent blackouts, the anchor phenomenon for the unit. Throughout the unit, they explore reasons why an electrical system may fail. Through firsthand experiences, discourse, reading, writing, and engaging with a digital simulation, students make discoveries about the way electrical systems work. Then, students apply what they have learned as they choose new energy sources and energy converters for the town, using evidence to explain why their choices will make the electrical system more reliable. As they work to solve the problem of blackouts in Ergstown, students will use and construct devices that convert energy from one form to another, build an understanding of the electrical system, and learn to identify energy forms all around them.

Why?

In this unit, students have a unique opportunity to think deeply about a topic that is relevant to their lives, and often in the media. A power failure is a real-life lesson in how much our society relies on electrical energy. Through this unit, students will better understand the parts of the electrical system and how vital it is to modern life. Students will also be introduced to the crosscutting science concepts of systems and energy. Energy can be a challenging concept, even for adults. Given its complexity, it requires a great deal of firsthand exploration and sense-making to help students ground their understanding and integrate their new knowledge. Spending an entire 20-lesson unit (plus a pre-assessment lesson and a culminating assessment lesson) to understand where energy comes from, how it moves through a system, and what forms it takes, provides students with the necessary experiences and supports to understand this phenomenon. The unit provides a jumping off point for students to develop, in later years, a deeper understanding of energy and how it can be transferred and converted. Furthermore, there is constant innovation in the world of electrical energy, and it is very likely that students will see many changes in—or perhaps even take a role in redesigning—the way that electrical energy is produced and used in their lifetimes.

Earth's Features

  What’s in This Unit?

In the role of geologists, students investigate how a dinosaur fossil found in the fictional Desert Rocks National Park formed, which serves as the anchor phenomenon for the unit. Students make inferences about the history of the park based on the fossil itself and the rock layers in which it is embedded. Investigating how the fossil formed leads students to learn about sedimentary rock formation. Students use books, hands-on investigations, and the Earth’s Features Simulation to figure out how fossils and sedimentary rock form and how different sediments build up in different environments, forming different rock in those environments. This helps them learn how to tell the environmental history of a place by observing the rock layers present. Finally, in an effort to explain a new anchor phenomenon, why two different canyons in the fictional Desert Rocks National Park have different amounts of exposed rock, students figure out that rock can be broken down and layers can become exposed by things in the environment, such as water.

Why?

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) require grade 4 students to use patterns in rock formations to describe the changes in a landscape over time. Additionally, the NGSS require students to observe how water can break down and transport rock material. This unit engages students with these concepts by focusing on something that excites and engages students: the discovery of a dinosaur fossil. Students investigate the fossils and kind of rock in a rocky outcrop to reveal the history of a location. The study of a dinosaur fossil in a rocky outcrop provides a great context for beginning to understand how geologists can use fossils and rock to determine what a place was like in the past.

Most fourth graders can identify and name geographical features of Earth’s surface—mountains, canyons, beaches, and oceans—but few students understand that these seemingly unchanging features have not always existed exactly as they are now. What is currently a rock formation in a desert may have once been a flat floodplain covered by a lush forest. This unit prompts students to think about how these features formed incrementally as sediment deposited, compacted, and cemented into rock over millions of years. Students gain an understanding of the connection between sediment deposition, rock formation, and environment. By understanding that sediment deposits and rock forms in particular environments, students can engage in an authentic practice of geology—making inferences about the past using data from the present. Armed with this understanding, students begin to conceptualize the small changes occurring in an environment that lead to dramatic changes to its landscape over time.