Lesson

The Milkweed in the Classroom lessons are designed to help students investigate a real-world phenomenon that is connected with students’ interests and experiences. In this unit, the monarch migration will act as the anchoring phenomenon and students will investigate the guiding question, “How has the monarch migration has changed over time and why?”

This EPA-funded, standards-aligned unit presents students with a real-world challenge of sustainably using limited natural resources to produce food, fiber, and fuel for a growing human population.

In this standards-aligned, 5-E lesson plan, students will learn about DNA by extracting it from strawberries, comparing and contrasting this process to extraction in another model organism, and applying concepts to better understand breeding new varieties of strawberry.

In this standards-aligned, 5-E lesson plan, students will explore a real-world application of genetics and Punnett Squares to help them understand how selective breeding impacts the health of livestock.

Students often fail to realize that a Punnett square represents the process of gene segregation in which the alleles encoding for a trait are separated during the formation of reproductive cells. In this standards-aligned, 5-E lesson plan, students will participate in an activity that allows the abstract concept of Mendelian studies to be applied to a trait easily seen in cattle, through the double muscling trait.

In this standards-aligned, 5-E lesson, students will learn about artificial lighting and its use in agricultural production, they will use engineering design principles and mathematics to design a model using plastic straws and tape and build a grow light stand out of PVC piping and connectors.

In this standards-aligned, 5-E life science lesson plan, students will learn that the goal of apple breeding is to continuously produce quality apples with desirable traits. Cross breeding and genetic engineering are two methods that have allowed breeders to produce better quality apples.

In this hands-on lesson, students will learn how precision agriculture uses geographic information systems (GIS) to help farmers and manufacturers make smart, efficient, and responsible decisions about how and when they plant, grow, irrigate, harvest, and transport crops.

Need a template for students to share out their noticings and wonderings? We've got you covered with our Husker Wonder Notice and Wonder template and Husker Wonder Slide Deck template.

The following lessons are provided to connect the Agpocalypse gameplay scenarios with broader learning objectives.