STEPP Lesson Plan Form

Teacher: Molly MacDougall

Date: 11/19/15

School:
Windsor High School
Content Area:
ESS
Title: Grown vs mined

Grade Level: High School

Lesson #: 4

Content Standard(s) addressed by this lesson:

directly from the standard)

(Write Content Standards

Standard 3. Earth Systems science

5. There are costs, benefits, and consequences of exploration, development,
and consumption of renewable and nonrenewable resources
a. develop, communicate, and justify an evidence-based scientific
explanation regarding the costs and benefits of exploration, development, and
consumption of renewable and nonrenewable resources.
Understandings: (Big Ideas)
Students will understand that resources are either grown or mined.
Students will understand that these methods have costs, benefits, and
consequences of exploration, development, and consumption.
Inquiry Questions: (Essential questions relating knowledge at end of the unit of
instruction, select applicable questions from standard)
Why are mined resources typically nonrenewable?
How can grown resources become unrenewable?
How do resources impact the market and the environment?
Evidence Outcomes: (Learning Targets)
Every student will be able to: (Create your own lesson objectives from the
standard, follow the ABCD format, using student voice)
I can: communicate and justify whether examples of resources are mined or grown
and whether these are sustainable
This means: I can play a science apples to apples game to explore different
examples of how theyre developed and justify why they fit different environmental
categories using prior knowledge.
List of Assessments: (Write the number of the learning target associated with
each assessment)
Index check in before they leave
Reflection on the back of the graphic organizer
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Planned Lesson Activities

Name and Purpose of Lesson
Should be a creative title for you and the
students to associate with the activity.
Think of the purpose as the mini-rationale
for what you are trying to accomplish
through this lesson.
Approx. Time and Materials
How long do you expect the activity to
last and what materials will you need?

Name: Grown or mined

Purpose: To have the students learn the different methods of acquiring
resources and that those two methods are varying degrees of
sustainability and environmental impact.

Anticipatory Set
The hook to grab students attention.
These are actions and statements by the
teacher to relate the experiences of the
students to the objectives of the lesson,
To put students into a receptive frame of
mind.
To focus student attention on the
lesson.
To create an organizing framework
for the ideas, principles, or
information that is to follow
(advanced organizers)
An anticipatory set is used any time a
different activity or new concept is to be
introduced.
Procedures
(Include a play-by-play account of what
students and teacher will do from the
minute they arrive to the minute they
leave your classroom. Indicate the length
of each segment of the lesson. List actual

(0-5 minutes)
Have students come inside to this warm up:
Using your prior knowledge decide, is nuclear energy a renewable
resource? How is that different from environmentally friendly?
(5-10 minutes)
Once everyone has settled down lead a quick class discussion over this
talking about uranium mining and sustainable vs low green house
emissions and the confusion.

Time: 90 minutes
Materials:
- Apples to Apples cards
- Graphic organizer
- paper for assessment

(10-35 minutes)
Go into lecture overview. This is the lecture they already took notes on
last night so bring up important points and interesting tidbits they
didnt know about.
(35-65 minutes) Have then play the apples to apples game with their
group mates. ***

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minutes.)
Indicate whether each is:
-teacher input
-modeling
-questioning strategies
-guided/unguided:
-whole-class practice
-group practice
-individual practice
-check for understanding
-other

This game is modeled off of the game apples to apples. If nobody has
played this before well do a quick survey before playing and do a quick
overview led by students on how to play the game. After thats
established Ill explain how to play which is this:
The students are given two decks of cards. The larger deck contains
many resources that are used around the world like wool, aluminum,
salt, etc. These have a short description to clarify what I mean by it and
examples used in production ie. Clothing, soda cans, table salt.
The other pile contains categories like (Grown- most economic, minedmost sustainable, grown-least sustainable). One person in the group per
round will be the judge and theyll draw a category card. Theyll have
their group mates chose an example card that they think best fits the
category and the judge will judge the one that fits it the best and
provide a reasoning on their graphic organizer.
Students will be given a clear explanation of the purpose of playing this
game before they begin playing it.
Once the students have exhausted their deck theyll reshuffle,
redistribute and play again hoping that the cards will get dealt and
matched up differently.
This activity will use students prior knowledge of what they know about
sustainability and economics to categorize these different resources
into whether they were grown or mined and justify whether they think
its a sustainable resource.
(65-75)
After the game is done the students will complete their graphic
organizer which provides a bit of a reflection on the process and higher
level thinking questions. And will turn it in. Up there theyll grab an
index check to complete.
*** Groups will be chosen by numbers distributed. During the warm up I
will pass out the graphic organizers. At the top they will have a number
on them. There will be 5-6 per team so the organizers will have

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numbers 1-4 on the top. Ill have numbered the tables before the class
and will tell the students at the time that depending on what number is
at the top of their sheet thats the table theyll congregate around to
play the game. This will mix things up a little bit because the kids get
kind of sick sitting in a group all day.
Closure
Those actions or statements by a teacher
that are designed to bring a lesson
presentation to an appropriate conclusion.
Used to help students bring things
together in their own minds, to make
sense out of what has just been taught.
Any Questions? No. OK, lets move on is
not closure. Closure is used:
To cue students to the fact that
they have arrived at an important
point in the lesson or the end of a
lesson.
To help organize student learning
To help form a coherent picture and to
consolidate.
Differentiation
To modify: If the activity is too advanced
for a child, how will you modify it so that
they can be successful?
To extend: If the activity is too easy for a
child, how will you extend it to develop
their emerging skills?

(75-90) Reflection questions from game and index assessment

If students have additional time at the end of class they can work on
homework that is due the following day, which is the next note set.

This lesson uses a lot of prior knowledge, but groups will be large
enough that the students should have a couple of people per group that
will know what theyre doing and will help guide them to understand.
Understanding the instructions might also be hard if theyve never
played apples to apples which is why theres so much explanation of
the rules at the beginning. But itll include the experts too so it
shouldnt be too boring.
The kids will have an opportunity to get loud with the game and have
fun with it which is its purpose, but I know when I play apples to apples
I tend to pick the card that is as far away from what it should be. Ill
have time to walk around while groups are playing to make sure that
type of playing isnt happening. Ill mention it in the rules too and thats
also why theyre recording the winners for the categories on their

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Assessment
How will you know if students met the
learning targets? Write a description of
what you were looking for in each
assessment.

organizer as a log to make sure everythings ok.

After the students are done with that theyll do an index check for me
which is just filling out what they learned from today on a half sheet of
paper. On the sheet of paper it will ask them what their definition of a
grown and mined resource is. Theyll be asked to provide an example of
a sustainable grown resource is, an unsustainable grown resource is,
and a mined resource with a low and a high environmental impact all
with justification.

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Post Lesson Reflection

Lesson Reflection
My goal for this lesson was not only to hit the learning objective but to
have the kids really involved in the learning process. In the activity that was
planned for this lesson the kids had resource cards and they were following a
worksheet to learn how the products were created and whether they were
mined or grown. They were putting them down on a grid and really just
following directions. I didnt like that because I thought the kids were capable
of doing much higher level thinking.
So I reworked the activity to require kids to really evaluate these
resources and not only think about whether they were mined or grown but
the environmental and market effects of each resource and think about the
impact it has on several parts of our lives, not just the environment. After
reading the reflection on the back of the graphic organizer I really feel like I
strongly hit that goal. When asked what to improve about this activity I feel
like the kids were really into it. None of them put just dont do it or
anything negative. They put constructive pieces like more cards or funnier
examples or put pictures on the cards. Some kids didnt put anything to
change and some even said that they had fun with it.
I feel like I hit the learning goals because under the question of what
they learned many put down the following:
How to figure out if a resource is mined or grown and solidifying what
that means for each resource
Figuring out how the different types of resources are used
How they have a market impact with supply and demand
How to apply grown vs mined to real world examples and economy
How to evaluate how the resources impact the environment
Even the cop out answers that the kids wrote were even on point with the
learning objective of just determining if a resource was mined or grown and
how it interacts with things in the environment and the market.
This time around I really spent a lot of time being vigilant about
classroom flow and structure since the way I teach really needs that kind of
structure so the kids arent chaotic. I put numbers on the top of their sheets
and on the tables so the kids arent figuring out grouping themselves and
really worked on a fluid progression so they arent even uncertain of what
theyre doing. I feel like there were some things I did on the fly that I didnt
account for in the lesson plan like finding a video for the last few minutes of
class (found one about moon mining) so they arent just sitting around since
they didnt have any homework to do. I feel like with an activity that was so
loud and rowdy the plan really played out really well in the lesson and I think
this is how Ill need to structure all of my plans. Luckily Im a really organized
person.
After talking with my cooperating teacher one of the obvious things
that I need to work on is my energy level. I think this was really essential
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while Im giving the presentation because you need a high energy level for
the kids to match so they dont just doze off while Im lecturing. I tried to
keep the kids involved with answering questions and the like but I totally
know where hes coming from. I think my energy level would have changed
for the afternoon classes for two reasons- 1) because its later in the day and
Im not so sleepy myself, and 2) I was so distracted thinking about how my
highly prepared and organized lesson is going to go that I have more room in
my brain to play with the things and keep the kids hooked. I think thats
something that just experience will give me the comfort to work on. But I
think thats also something in my personality, Im not an outwardly hilarious
or comedic person so Ill have to always be working on being boring.
But overall Im feeling so jazzed because this went totally well, to have
the kids so on point with the learning targets and have them enjoy being in
my classroom and doing higher level thinking was just so exciting!
Assessment Reflection
So what I was talking about above was a reflection I had the kids do on
the back page of the graphic organizer I had them turn in to help me with
changing up my lesson.
What I had them do after they were done with that was an informal
assessment piece. I never called it an assessment on purpose because I
didnt want kids to be freaking out about it, I really just wanted to see what
they retained and what they learned from the day.
I had on the top two definitions for mined resources and grown
resources then below I had four examples that they had to put for: 1) a
sustainably grown resource, 2) an unsustainably grown resource, 3) a mined
resource with a low environmental impact, and 4) a mined resource with a
high environmental impact
It was one point for each of these, the average was 4.8, the highest was 6
the lowest was 2. The median was 5 and the mode was a tie between 5 and
6. I feel like the kids had a hard time with remembering the definition of what
sustainable was so I helped them with that since that wasnt what I was
assessing- I was really assessing how they felt categorizing grown vs mined
resources and their capability of evaluating their acquisition and impact on
the earth.
I found that some didnt give an example, they just listed a definition
which I gave part points off because I wanted them to think of real life not
just abstract. Sometimes they put a mined resource for grown for the
unsustainable category so the kids had a hard time distinguishing that. But I
think they had a great higher level thinking for evaluating uranium.
I wish I had asked for a reasoning for the examples because sometimes
they put something that could fly but I wasnt sure if they were putting it
there for the write reasons.
I did provide feedback to the students on each paper so that they could
learn from their mistakes when I hand it back and clear up their
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misconceptions since we were really playing with their prior knowledge, and
the prior knowledge of their peers during this lesson.

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