March 31, 2020 -

As you continue to deal with the new normal in education, and behavior plans and lunch duty are replaced with synchronous communication and continuity in education, I want to share a few Spark 101 STEM Skills Videos that are Science focused.  Talking with our teacher network, I know that many middle and high school teachers are looking for more interactive Science content. I’m also going to share some things for our elementary friends, as I know they are looking for content and many upper grade teachers may have younger learners at home.  (Here is a link to my blog of my favorite Math lessons on Spark 101.) (Remember that you can search for ‘Science’ on spark101.org or click on the Science button on our home screen to see the Science videos.  If you are looking for a specific state indicator, you may search by that as well to see if we have a direct match.)

Managing Energy Consumption to Reduce Environmental Impact

‘Managing Energy Consumption to Reduce Environmental Impact’ is a video we created with Bithenergy.  There are high school and middle school lessons to go along with this video.  We also have a home lesson that can easily be used by parents and elementary teachers.  There are a number of resources available on the materials section to help with delivery of this lesson.  Along with those 3 lessons, there is a Project Management lesson that we created with help from friends at PMI. 

Sneak Peek!!!

If you happen to click on the Science button on Spark 101, the top 5 videos are our new set of Spark 101 Career Snapshots.  We have not even officially released these videos yet.  The Career Snapshots are a 90-second look at an industry.  I’m not going to talk about these too much right now.  They each have middle school, elementary school, and counseling lessons.  I can tell you that there will soon be Spanish versions of the videos on Spark 101.  Keep an eye open for more information about these soon.

Reducing Food Waste for Global Sustainability

‘Reducing Food Waste for Global Sustainability’ has students analyzing data to reduce waste in a landfill.  There are lessons for elementary, middle, and high school on Spark 101.  While we do supply you with data from our friends at Sodexo for the students to analyze, you could easily adapt it to have students collect data at home.

How Do Land Use, Physical Parameters, and Benthic Surveys Measure the Health of a Stream?

I’m going to call this our ‘Stream Health’ video.  (The current title is more than a mouthful.)  Students use a number of different factors to assess the health of different waterways.  While it is one of our older videos, the content is still great and easily accessible.  (If you know a company or organization that wants to fund us to make an updated version, let me know!)  There are elementary, middle, and high schools lesson along with lots of resources in the materials section.  Take a nature walk.  Go with your family, or alone of you need a break.  You can observe, count, tally and analyze any number of things living and non-living in nature.  

Using Spark 101 at Home

There are many more videos on Spark 101 with Science as a focused skill.  Remember that our lessons are just ideas.  We want educators to change and adapt them to meet their needs.  That is one of the reasons why we keep our lesson plans downloadable. 

If you are new to Spark 101 or want to share our resources with people in your network, we created a simple step-by-step guide to show teachers and parents how to use our free resources. We also put together a post specifically about how to use Spark 101 as a distance learning resource.

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