Lesson 1 - Pretest and Expressing Ideas

Download PDF of Lesson 1 Teacher's Guide

In this lesson, students take a pretest and share their initial ideas about animal growth, identifying what animals need to grow and gain mass.

Guiding Question

What happens to food that animals eat?

Activities in this Lesson

Activity 1.1: Animals Unit Pretest (20 min)
Activity 1.2: Expressing Ideas and Questions about How Animals Grow (40 min)

Unit Map

Unit Map for Lesson 1

Target Performances

Lesson 1 – Pretest and Expressing Ideas (students as questioners)
Activity 1.1: Animals Unit Pretest	Students show their initial proficiencies for the overall unit goal: Questioning, investigating, and explaining how animals move and change matter and energy as they live, move, and grow.
Activity 1.2: Expressing Ideas about How Animals Grow	Students ask and record specific questions about changes in matter and energy in response to the unit driving question: What happens when ethanol burns?

NGSS Performance Expectations

This lesson helps students start thinking about all of the unit NGSS Performance Expectations but does not feature a mastery of any of them.

Three-dimensional Learning Progression

The pretest and discussion in this lesson (a) help students to anticipate and begin thinking about the questions that they will answer in this lesson and (b) help you as a teacher see how your student reason about how matter and energy are transformed when animals eat, grow, move, and breathe (digestion, biosynthesis, and cellular respiration). In the Application Activity Sequence, both activity 1.1 and activity 1.2 in this lesson serve as the “Establish the Problem” phase for all the activities in the Animals unit.

Key Ideas and Practices for Each Activity

In Activity 1.1, the unit pretest is useful for two purposes. Your students’ responses will help you decide how much detail you want to include during the unit, particularly details about chemical structures of materials. If your students are mostly at Level 2 in the carbon learning progression, you may want to focus on the main ideas (like the tracing of matter and energy and the Three Questions) rather than chemical structures. Your students’ responses will also provide a starting point for discussions about the focus for this unit.

In Activity 1.2, through the demonstration and discussion students will come to recognize that they have many different ideas about what happens when animals grow, as well as unanswered questions. We expect many students to express Level 2 or Level 3 ideas, for example, that animals grow because their cells divide, or that gas has no mass.

Key carbon-transforming processes: Digestion, Biosynthesis, and Cellular Respiration

Content Boundaries and Extensions

Talk and Writing

At this stage in the unit, the students will be Expressing Ideas and Questions. The table below shows specific talk and writing goals for this phase of the unit.

Talk and Writing Goals for Expressing Ideas and Questions Phase	Teacher Talk Strategies that Support this Goal	Curriculum Components that Support this Goal
Treat this as brainstorming and elicitation.	Remember, there are no “right” answers at this point. We want to hear all ideas.	Unit Pretest My Students’ Answers
Listen for ideas about what is happening to matter and energy at different scales.	Where did the energy come from? Where does the matter go next? Are you talking about matter or energy? What about the atomic-molecular scale? What about the cellular scale?	Unit Pretest Expressing Ideas and Questions Process Tool
Listen for a wide range of student ideas. Press for more complete ideas.	Who can add to that? What do you mean by _____? Say more. I think you said _____. Is that right?
Have students compare, contrast, and document their ideas.	Who has a different idea? How are those ideas similar/different? Who can rephrase ________’s idea? Let’s record our ideas so we can come back to them and see how our ideas change.	Sticky notes on the class poster Activity 1.2 Presentation
Encourage students to provide evidence for their ideas.	How do you know that? What have you seen in the world that makes you think that?	Sticky notes on the class poster.