Alien Earths

Activities

Overview

This unit is intended to be taught as a whole piece, with the language arts, mathematics, and science activities being integrated into the entire school day. However, this approach may not be feasible depending on pacing guides, administrative requirements, or prescribed curriculum materials. If that is the case, these activities may be broken up and taught independently. In that event I recommend beginning with the language arts activities and proceeding to the science activities after that. The mathematics activities could be adapted to fit in another time or set aside if strictly necessary. The activities will be broken into three sections, each focused on one subject area, to maximize flexibility. The Procedures portion of each section is subdivided into daily content to be covered, but teachers are encouraged to extend or compress time frames as needed.

Section 1: Language Arts

Objectives

Students will learn to make inferences about fictional texts with a focus on characters and setting, and they will identify specific text and picture clues that support their conclusions. Students will engage in the descriptive writing process, including revision and editing.

Materials

A wide variety of picture books featuring alien characters (see the Materials for Classroom Use section for suggestions), anchor chart materials, projector, drawing supplies

Procedures

• Day 1: Introduce students to the idea of making inferences. A fun way to do this is by showing a Pixar short or a clip from one on YouTube. Watch the video once uninterrupted, then watch it a second time, pausing at key moments to model the process of making inferences about characters, setting, motivations, etc. Emphasize using clues from the video to support the conclusions you come to. Watch a different clip and have students turn and talk to make their own inferences, ensuring that they are identifying the evidence from the clip that supports their conclusion. Create an anchor chart about making inferences.
• Day 2: Review the anchor chart. Choose a picture book with alien characters and read it aloud twice—the first time with fluency and expression, the second time pausing at strategic points to model the process of making inferences and identifying the text and picture clues to support them. After several models, have students make their own inferences by asking questions about the characters and settings.
• Day 3: Repeat the process from day two, placing greater emphasis on having students make the inferences. Use the turn-and-talk process and ensure that students are identifying the text and picture clues that support their inferences. Use this opportunity to introduce the science vocabulary terms included in the Habitability on Earth section of this unit. Begin making inferences about the alien characters’ physical and behavioral adaptations, as well as inferences about its home world. For example, if a picture shows an alien that is tall and darkly colored with sharp teeth you may infer that it is a predator, perhaps from a planet with lower gravity, that benefits from its dark shading while hunting.
• Day 4: If teaching in conjunction with the science activities, review the information and anchor chart already created about the planets. Otherwise, initiate a discussion with students about what they already know about the planets in our solar system. Create an anchor to record their knowledge, filling in gaps as needed. Ask students to consider what they might look like on these different planets—what adaptations might they need to have in order to survive in these different environments? How are they making those inferences? Project and watch the video titled “How You’d Look Living on Different Planets” on YouTube (https://youtu.be/GwM4Jg9ChvM) and discuss. Tell students that they will be using what they learn here to help give them ideas for creating their own alien creatures.
• Day 5: Give students material and time to draw an alien creature of their own design. Remind them to think closely about the environment their alien is coming from and to use that to help guide what their alien looks like. Review the anchor chart on making inferences and remind students that their drawings should contain enough detail that a view could make inferences about the alien and its native ecosystem from looking at it. For fun, while students are drawing, consider playing them NASA’s data sonification clips from the Hubble Space Telescope images. An explanation of data sonification and the clips can be found at https://www.nasa.gov/content/explore-from-space-to-sound. After students have drawn their aliens, have them take a gallery walk to look at their peers’ drawings and make some quiet inferences to themselves. Once everyone has had a chance to see all of the drawings, have them return to their seats and share their alien with a partner. Use the turn-and-talk procedure and have each child make inferences about the other’s alien.
• Day 6: In advance, make your own alien drawing. Use the drawing to model making inferences about the creature’s adaptations and native ecosystem, then model writing a creative paragraph about the alien. Introduce any remaining science vocabulary and bring it into the paragraph.
• Days 7 – 10: Give students ample to time to write, revise, and edit their paragraphs, working with small groups or individuals as needed. When all students have completed their final drafts, have them share with a partner or the whole class, as time allows. This is also an opportunity to present mini-lessons on using sensory details in writing, sentence structure, adjectives, and more.

Section 2: Science

Objectives

Students will describe the living and nonliving components of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and examine the variety of relationships among living organisms in these ecosystems, as well as explore the effects of disruptions to these systems. Students will analyze and describe the adaptations that living organisms use to satisfy their life needs.

Materials

Spiral-bound notebooks or composition books to create interactive journals, projector, computers, a variety of research materials on ecosystems and food chains (see the Materials for Classroom use section for suggestions).

Procedures

• Day 1: Initiate a discussion with students about what they already know about the planets in our solar system. Create a KWL chart for their interactive notebooks and use them to record their knowledge and questions. Project the NASA Space Place website (https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/menu/solar-system/) and use the Solar System tab to explore each planet in succession. You can click on the animated picture of each planet to read interesting facts about them. Have students record at least two facts about each planet in their interactive notebook.
• Day 2: Finish working through the planets on the Space Place website from day one. Review the order of the planets using a mnemonic device or song and create an anchor chart to record this. Include information for use in mathematics activities such as the length of time it takes for light from the sun to reach the planet or the length of its year. This information can be found at the Space Place website, with additional information available by clicking the link to NASA Solar System Exploration—this is an excellent way to scale the unit up by using larger and more precise numbers.
• Day 3: Review the anchor chart and lead a discussion with students about life. Where do we find life in the solar system? How do we know something is alive? Could life exist on other planets? Why or why not? Project and watch the video clip titled “Extremophiles 101” by National Geographic on YouTube (https://youtu.be/MY1d5Saqrc4), then ask students to consider the questions again in light of this information. Discuss that many scientists believe there may be life here in our own solar system, but we do not yet have the technology to prove it. So when we talk about life in the rest of this unit, we are talking about life as we know it on Earth. Have students record that life requires liquid water and the correct temperature to exist.
• Day 4: Explain that scientists have several ways to search for other planets, and many have been found. Project and watch the video clip titled “Searching for Other Planets Like Ours” found on NASA Space Place (https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/exoplanet-snap/en/). If possible, download, shrink, and print the poster on that page for inclusion in the interactive notebook. Discuss the term habitable and relate it to habitat. Have students share what they already know about habitats and guide them to the working definition that a habitat is a place where living organisms are able to meet all of their life needs. Have students record this and draw a picture to go with it.
• Day 5: Review the alien creatures that students drew and explain that for the next part of the unit, they will be pretending to be these alien creatures. Put them into their predetermined groups and introduce them to the fictional intergalactic organization STAR (Society for Terrestrial and Aquatic Research). If this can be done with some fanfare all the better! Tell them that a new planet called Earth has been discovered, and their teams are being dispatched to learn about its life forms. Project the website Study Jams and watch the video on ecosystems (https://studyjams.scholastic.com/studyjams/jams/science/ecosystems/). Discuss and record key terms, along with illustrations, into the interactive notebook.
• Day 6: Choose one of the ecosystems specified in the Content Background section and model the processes you want students to use when researching their assigned environment. Ideally, have the rubric you plan to use ready to distribute and review to ensure students are clear about the expectations.
• Day 7-10: Give students ample time to research and create their presentations. Regardless of the format you choose to employ, projects must contain:
  • A visual model of the ecosystem featuring key biotic and abiotic components, labeled
  • An explanation (visual or written) of the relationships among the various living organisms and a written projection of what would occur if there were disruptions to that balance
  • An explanation of the physical and behavioral adaptations of at least two different organisms in the ecosystem and an analysis of how those adaptations help the organism to survive

As student groups work, you should continually circulate to provide support and clarification as needed. At the completion of the project, student groups will present their findings to STAR. If possible, invite parents and/or administration to this.

Section 3: Mathematics

This section is more open-ended than the previous two. Because this unit has been written with third grade students in mind, the very large and/or highly precise numbers associated with space are not necessarily appropriate. Additionally, how one chooses to use the numbers—with graphing activities, simple or complex computation, with a focus on place value and rounding, etc.—is highly flexible and can generally be made to fit within whatever pacing parameters a given district employs. Below are a few examples of what I plan to employ in my own classroom, but teachers should not feel limited to these. Due again to the high degree of flexibility with this subject matter, these activities are not linked to a specific day.

Possible Lesson Activities

1. Review the planet anchor chart created during the science portion and pose a series of computation questions based on the recorded information for students to solve on paper or white board. Pair students up to develop their own computation problems for the class to solve.
2. Use the planet anchor chart to develop word problems of varying levels of complexity for students to solve. Put students into small groups to write their own problem, then give individual students sticky notes and employ a gallery walk format for students to solve the problems. These may be collected for use as a formative assessment.
3. Project a scale model of the solar system (there are many visuals available for classroom use with a simple Google search) and simplify the numbers. Alternatively, check out this online scale calculator—input a desired diameter for the sun in inches, and get the distance from the sun to each planet (https://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/solar_system/)! Even if you don’t attempt to actually measure these distances out, there are lots of ways to play with the numbers and give students a real sense of the immense (to us) scale.
4. When discussing food chains and the impacts of disruptions to an ecosystem, have students calculate what would happen if a population doubled every day for 10 days. How many organisms do you have at the end of that time? What effects would that have on the ecosystem? This same idea could also be reversed, with the population being halved each day.
5. Discuss the concept of light years—rounding as needed for simplicity) and have students calculate how far light will have traveled over a given period of time.