Unfortunately, the USA isn’t doing as well as it used to be internationally when it comes to high school science. An international survey in 1998 ranked 12th graders in the USA 19th out of 21 countries surveyed. While that survey is now ten years old, there hasn’t been any real change since then. It’s high time all teachers had a good look at their science lesson plans and had a hard think about how we’re teaching science, as well as what science we’re teaching.

One of the problems that many teachers encounter when drafting up science lesson plans is helping students to grasp difficult concepts, and making science interesting rather than something that “only nerds/geeks do”. While teachers have a number of potential tools to make science more lively and relevant – and understandable – one of the easiest teaching tools to get the knack of is the video or DVD player – or more up-to-date classroom technology such as online clips and video feeds.

Videos have a lot of advantages for teaching science. With a video – whether your science lesson plan involves an elementary-level Magic Schoolbus jaunt through the innards of a flower or a more advanced animation explaining black holes and relativity – your students have the chance to go on impossible journeys and get a grasp of advanced concepts with their imaginations as well as with the logical parts of their mind – and concepts in the imagination tend to be better understood and easier to recall.

And videos have another advantage: the rewind button, which means a clip or sector can be watched again and again so a point can be properly understood.

Videos can be fitted into a science lesson plan in many different ways. While the first thing that springs to many teachers’ minds when you think about using video in a science lesson is full-length documentaries that take up the whole lesson (or most of it), this is not the only way to use a video.

Use short bites of video to bring variety into your lesson and to let another voice speak to explain a concept. How about playing the segment in Young Einstein where the (very offbeat) Einstein outlines his thought experiment about riding on a wave of light? Or that popular YouTube clip by Alpine Kat explaining particle physics and what the Large Hadron Collider aims to do?

Demonstrations. Some experiments just can’t be done in your classroom. Either you don’t have the equipment or the experiment is too potentially dangerous to leave in the hands of a room full of fidgety adolescents. But you can show someone else doing the experiment on video quite safely and cheaply.

Analysis. Just say your science lesson plan for today was on animal adaptations. After teaching the main points, you can then show a clip of one or two animals in action (you could try leaving the sound off as a way of focusing your students on what they can see and notice for themselves rather than relying on what the presenter tells them) and get your class to list all the specialised adaptations the animal they watched has (e.g. the cheetah is spotted to give it camouflage, it has long legs to help it run fast, etc.)

What you shouldn’t do is just mindlessly plug and play, leaving your students to watch the video while you catch up on a little grading or other paperwork. The most valuable and affordable resource for enhancing your classroom lessons is educational videos and DVDs. So make sure you’re using video the right way and see immediate benefits in your students’ engagement, retention and test performance by clicking here. Are you using them as well as you could?

Science lessons plans can include disappearing water through evaporation, or making a magical rainbow from prisms. Try a science lesson plan by growing Basilisk Fang plants in a pot of dirtless, hydroponic soil.

Science lessons plans involving the Golden Snitch, disappearing ink, fingerprint clues, mystery powers and bubble powders will excite every elementary education student in your science classes with Harry Potter’s easy science experiments. Your classes will make all your students want to come to school on science days.

Science lesson plans with Hagrid and his magical animal friend Buckbeak were always an exciting class for Harry, Ron and Hermione. When organizing animal and bird science lesson plans for your class, you can incorporate a little bit of Hogwarts’ lessons ideas. Science lesson plans can also incorporate art lessons. Drawing mystical creatures or real life ones can be fun. Reading lesson plans can also incorporate literature from the Harry Potter series, creating an entire Harry Potter module for your class this year.

Harry, Ron and Hermione loved their lessons in the greenhouse at Hogwarts school. Each science lesson plan about plants studied with other classmates from Gryffindor and Slytherin House taught them much about the care for living things in their world. Although their world differs a great deal from ours, we need to understand the importance of plant life in our world too.

There are many different types of plants that can be incorporated into your lesson plans. Science lesson plans can also include actual student gardens with a hands-on approach as did those lessons at Hogarts with Harry Potter and his friends. Students can learn how to plant vegetables and flowers, to care for them and to harvest them. Local nurseries have helped supply topsoil, fertilizers and mulches.

There are many aspects of gardening and plant knowledge that can be incorporated into your science lesson plans.

Related Post: