From Molecules to Organisms: Structures and Processes

  Eat Like a Bird is the January lesson of a series of 10 monthly Feathered Friends lessons created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Pennington Wild Birds. The lesson focuses on bird beak forms and the type of food each bird has evolved ...

This unit is comprised of a series of lessons that follow the 5E model, providing students with opportunities to learn about pollination on different levels. Studying the structures and functions of flowers and bees through text, video, and observati ...

In this activity, students monitor the position of plants to find out whether or not they change position in response to a change in sunlight. By measuring the distance from a leaf to a sunny window, students can generate data to prove plants move to ...

This article from NSTA's Science and Children outlines a series of lessons on structure and function, with an extension lesson that incorporates related engineering design. Students are guided to observe ants in their natural habitat, experiment ...

This short, high-definition video shows a struggle between a wasp and an ant in extreme closeup. After viewing, students should be able to make inferences about the functions of certain specialized structures of each insect and support their ideas wi ...

This activity, created by the California Academy of Sciences, gives students the opportunity to explore the relationship between the structure of their teeth and their various functions. The students eat different types of food, consciously noti ...

This short activity, one of many "Science Snacks" from the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, provides students with an opportunity to create ear structures that model the ears of familiar animals and explore how ...

In this activity students examine how the structure of various animal mouthparts affects their function. They will have an opportunity to predict what foods are likely to be eaten by birds with different beak types, watch a video compa ...

In this series of activities, students collect and observe different types of seeds and hypothesize about how they might be dispersed. They also investigate the design of seeds that use a helicopter method of wind dispersal, which offers an oppo ...

This article from the March 2015 issue of Science and Children (which focuses on the Crosscutting Concept of Structure and Function), provides detailed plans for a lesson sequence on structure and function for upper elementary students. It incorporat ...

In this activity, students experience the difficulty of trying to gather food with an ineffective model of an insect mouthpart, and then investigate how effective various insect mouth structures are for gathering different food sources. 

In this activity students examine how the structure of various animal mouthparts affects their function. They will have an opportunity to predict what foods are likely to be eaten by birds with different beak types, watch a video compa ...

This 4th grade unit is designed to address the concept that organisms sense the environment in order to live. It is a far-ranging and comprehensive unit that is designed to address multiple NGSS performance expectations (4-LS1-2, 4LS1-2, 4-PS3-2, 4-P ...

This resource provides some background information and discussion questions about camouflage and countershading as an example of penguin adaptation. Then students engage in an experiment to simulate the effectiveness of blubber as an insulator agains ...

Students learn about insect body structures and their functions through print materials and a video, and then design their own insect to demonstrate understanding of essential life processes.

This is a good lesson on echolocation.

Students will identify the parts of a honey bee, the stages of its life cycle, and its role in pollination.

lessons and worksheet

Nearly all of the slides from the PowerPoint presentation are included. Samples of books written by teachers are highlighted.