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list of lesson plans

Teacher Information

• Goals & Objectives
• Background info
• Materials List
• Resources
• References
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Lesson Plans

• Basic Outline
• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3 - 4
• Day 5
• Day 6 - 8
• Day 9 - 19

Student Information

• Student Grouping
• Studying the Behavior of Ants
• Summary of the Activity
• Ant Information
• Ant Rearing info.

Grades

• Overview
• Journal
• Written Presentation
• Oral Presentation

Grade Sheets

• Poster Presentation
• Oral Presentation
• Journal

Daily Plan

Day 2

1. Give students handouts explaining what they will be doing over the next few weeks and how they will be graded. Tell students to record everything they do for the activity in their Science journal.
   
   
2. Ask students the following question:

• Based upon your observations yesterday, do you think that ants have a preference for what type of material they collect?

• generate several hypotheses as to what the ants may prefer to collect based upon the previous day's observations. You should agree upon a single hypothesis.
  
  
• discuss the making of plans and materials to test their hypothesis.
  
  
• design a method for taking data together and decide how to record quantitative data (i.e. how often ants select specific objects), and descriptive data (other behavioral observations).

Be sure that all three students in each group can participate in the gathering of data when the experimental plan is designed.

Additional resources for class 2

1. Students should receive handouts at the beginning of the hour explaining what they will be doing over the next few weeks. Explain the major steps of the activity and tell students that the purpose of the activity is for them to learn how scientists figure things out. Tell students that they must start to keep all their information for the activity in a journal or a special place in their science notebooks.
   
   
2. The main goal for Day 2 is to model the steps of the scientific method. Begin by making a hypothesis to answer the first question.
   
   Teacher: "Based upon your observations yesterday, do you think that ants have a preference for the type of material they collect?"
   
   Write the answers on the board. This basic question lends itself to some very simple hypotheses that students have a good chance of developing. Students are familiar with their own macro environment enough that they can speculate what types of things ants may collect. They also know their own basic human needs, which they will be able to project onto ants.
   
   Student: "The ants are looking for food, other ants, leaves...."
   
   
3. Do not confirm or dismiss their answers. Pick one of the explanations and then ask:
   
   "How could we make an experiment to see if this explanation is true?"
   
   Students will give ideas on how to conduct an experiment. If you use the "Looking for leaves" explanation, you should attempt to coerce a concise hypothesis from the students as to what they will need to do to see if the ants are going to a leaf source because they want leaves. A good hypothesis might be:
   
   "If the ants want leaves, they will go to the leaf source, stop, take a piece of leaf, and then return to the nest."
   
   Tell the students to think, within their groups, of where they think the ants are going and to make a statement that they could test to see if their idea is correct. Circulate amongst the students and help when they get stuck. Their greatest problem will be to construct a testable hypothesis based on an idea of where (and why) the ants were going. An untestable statement would be: They are going to the highest point of the biggest tree to get the best view. This isn't testable because we can't go to the top of the highest tree to observe them. After deciding on their individual hypotheses, continue developing the water idea as a group and make a hypothesis similar to the one above. Next, tell the students to spend a few minutes thinking about how exactly they will do the experiment and to write down the steps to their plan. They will likely write some simplified, non-quantifiable plan that will be a reasonable start. While roaming through the groups, you can ask :

• "How many leaves will you use?"
  
  
• "Will you place the leaves on the ground or in a container?"
  
  
• "How long will you watch to see what happens?"

4. Try to make the students be specific. After about five minutes, lead the class in a group discussion geared towards designing an acceptable experimental plan. Go through each step of the plan and come up with something like this:

• Fill 8 large petri dishes with water, seeds, leaves, branches, dead insects, peanut butter, sugar, or meat.
• Place each in a depression so that the top of the dish is level with the ground.
• Spread the dishes an equal distance apart, 2 meters away from the exit hole to the colony.
• Place a group of students at each petri dish and for 10 minutes count how many ants take the object from the petri dish.
• Repeat experiment two more times.

5. Five minutes before the end of the hour, discuss how they will take their data. Tell them that they need an organized manner to take, collect, and record their data. Show them a data table that you will use to collect data for the "leaves" hypothesis. The data table would look like this: