At-Home Instruction

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.

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.

Looking for a flexible way to practice noticing and wondering with your middle school or high school students? Check out this collection of graphs, maps, and charts! Each highlights a FEWSS (food, energy, water, and societal systems) topic and can be used as a focal point for students' sense-making discussions. You can use these as a bell-ringer, anchoring or investigative phenomenon, exit ticket, etc. Additional resources (notice and wonder t-chart template and class slide deck template) are provided to help you and your students get started!

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

Farming is a balancing act. Are you ready to take on the challenge of maximizing production while using limited resources like land and water? Play AgPocalypse to test your skills!

LOOPY is a tool for thinking in systems created by Nicky Case. It allows you to quickly sketch system components (as circles) and their interactions (as arrows) and press play to simulate how a system behaves. In no time at all, you will be experimenting with negative and positive feedback loops, testing predictions, and, most importantly, having fun playing with your system creations.

The following resources provide more information about the phenomenon at the heart of the Prairie Protector digital game-woody encroachment in the Great Plains- and its social, economic, and environmental impacts.