students develop ideas related to how sounds are produced, how they travel through media, and how they affect objects at a distance. Their investigations are motivated by trying to account for a perplexing anchoring phenomenon — a truck is playing loud music in a parking lot and the windows of a building across the parking lot visibly shake in response to the music.
They make observations of sound sources to revisit the K–5 idea that objects vibrate when they make sounds. They figure out that patterns of differences in those vibrations are tied to differences in characteristics of the sounds being made. They gather data on how objects vibrate when making different sounds to characterize how a vibrating object’s motion is tied to the loudness and pitch of the sounds they make. Students also conduct experiments to support the idea that sound needs matter to travel through, and they will use models and simulations to explain how sound travels through matter at the particle level.
Open Sci Ed storyline and landing page for download Unit: 14 lessons (24 days)
How does a one-way mirror work? Though most everyone knows that one-way mirrors exist, having students model how they work turns out to be a very effective way to develop their thinking about how visible light travels and how we see images. Initial student models in this 6th grade light and matter science unit reveal a wide variety of ideas and explanations that motivate the unit investigations that help students figure out what is going on and lead them to a deeper understanding of the world around them.
A video of an experience with a one-way mirror, gets students to organize and write down their initial ideas and then they dig in to test those ideas and figure out what is really happening. Students build a scaled box model of what they saw in the video to test out their ideas. Using two boxes combined together with a one-way mirror in between the two, students vary the presence of light in the two boxes to figure out how a one-way mirror works and improve their initial models so they accurately explain how light is reflected and transmitted through materials and the basics of how these behaviors of light result in the images we see.
UNIT: 8 lessons (18 days) storyline and download launch page
https://44elql2eypwn1m72oi3syrrr-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/6.1-Light-Matter-Storyline.pdf
and
https://www.openscied.org/instructional-materials/6-1-light-matter/
https://education.microsoft.com/en-us/hackingStem/lesson/655d724c
What is the electromagnetic spectrum?
By: Microsoft Education & NASA | LESSON PLAN
Materials
prism
UV beads single color
cardboard box
infrared (IR) LED
red LED
green LED
blue LED
ultraviolet (UV) LED
half breadboard
resistors 10 ohm (brown-black-black
male-to-male jumper wires
sandpaper 220 grit or nail file
Connect micro:bit
Sparkfun micro:bit Breakout
Micro USB Cable
micro:bit
Connect Arduino Uno
Arduino Uno microcontroller
USB cable type A to type B