Energy Unit

I did a lot of fun, hands-on activities for our energy unit but due to COVID (again) I wasn’t able to get through them all.

One of my favourite activities, pictured in this post, was also one of the students’ favourites.

I cut out various energy cycles and then handed out one piece of paper to each student. The students were seated on the carpet and we able to spread out. Each paper had a word written on it in a certain colour, ex: human, cow, grass = all green words.

The students were then asked to find the other people in the class with the matching colours. Once they found their group, they were asked to put the sources of energy in order. Ex: human gets energy from cow and cow gets energy from grass.

Once each group had placed their energy chains in order, we would go around to each group and ask them to read their chain out loud and have a discussion about each of them.

The secret from this activity was that I was holding the word “sun” in my hand. It was yellow and didn’t match with any of the energy chains. This stirred up a conversation about which chain the sun belonged to. Finally, we determined that the sun belonged to all of the energy chains because the sun was the central source of energy.

We played this game a couple of different times throughout the unit to have them up and moving and as a conversation starter for our next lessons.