Glesner Lesson Plan

Day 1 - Spectra Lesson

This lesson has three parts, but the overall goal is to review what a spectrum is, that they come in many forms, but that the light can help us learn about the source (like what is made of).

Part 1 is a popcorn reading exercise, where the whole class reads through an article about how astronomers use light to gain information. The article is useful because it sets up the objective of the whole five lesson unit, and it explains the three most common forms of spectra.

Part 2 will ask students to white board in small groups. I encourage having them pick one student to be the reader who still has the article open and the other is the writer who writes what they pick on their board. Students are tasked to describe what each spectra type looks like and how they are produced. Pairs will be asked to share what they wrote to the whole class.

Part 3 is an activity that is awesome for the kids to see in action, but will be difficult to do if you don’t already have the materials. My school owns some gas tube light bulbs, power sources, and diffraction glasses that let students see elemental spectra. Students are tasked with viewing the spectra and trying to identify which light is which element based on example spectra images to pick from.

Materials and Resources

• White boards, markers, and erasers
• “Using Light to Study Planets” Article
• Identifying Elements Based on Spectra Hand out
• Example Spectra Handout
• Absorption Spectra Exit Ticket
• Absorption Spectra Exit Ticket KEY

Gas Spectrum Tubes (we have about 8 different types)

Spectrum Tube Power Supply (we have about 8)

Diffraction Glasses (make sure to get pairs with a vertical slit pattern, many of the pairs I find online have patterns or shapes that make them useless for this activity)

Results

This lesson went really well overall, however it definitely took closer to 80 min instead of the 60 min I predicted. The popcorn reading was helpful for my students to read along a text that was more complex or academic than they are used to. The reading has reflection questions at the end that we skipped, and when small groups were sharing their whiteboards I only had each group share about one spectrum type to save time. The spectra identification activity went well at the end and students had a fun time. Seeing the spectra in real life I think helped make the lesson more real and gave them a more concrete understanding.

Day 2 - Star Spectra Simulation

In this lesson students use a GIZMO simulation online to learn about classifying stars based on their absorption spectra and other aspects of stars that can be seen through their spectra. I really like how easy it is to compare spectra in this simulation, but would advise against using GIZMO’s handout. Their version of the lab felt hard to follow and poorly scaffolded. About halfway through my lesson student pairs are assigned a more difficult star to investigate and then share their findings to the whole class at the end.

If you students are not used to using Gizmo, it can be difficult to log in at first. I recommend making a step by step guide handout for students similar to this.

In the second half of the simulation, I assign each pair a different unusual star (5-10) to focus on. These stars showcase interesting features that make the spectra look atypical. I purposely designed the later half of the lesson to be a pairs activity where they communicate with each other about what they are seeing and what they think. Then later each pair has to share out to the whole class about what they found about their star creating both a listening and speaking task.This also makes the lesson short enough to fit into one hour.

Materials and Resources

• Star Spectra Simulation Hand out
• Star Spectra Simulation KEY
• Access to Gizmo
• Whiteboards, markers, and erasers

Results

This lesson went really well overall, however it definitely took closer to 80 min instead of the 60 min I predicted. The popcorn reading was helpful for my students to read along a text that was more complex or academic than they are used to. The reading has reflection questions at the end that we skipped, and when small groups were sharing their whiteboards I only had each group share about one spectrum type to save time. The spectra identification activity went well at the end and students had a fun time. Seeing the spectra in real life I think helped make the lesson more real and gave them a more concrete understanding.

Student Artifacts

Day 3 - Black Body Radiation

The Black Body Radiation Lesson is all about the connection between an object’s temperature and the amount and colors of light it emits. Students learned about how this relates to stars in the past during Earth Science class, but none of my students looked at or worked with these spectra. I use the black body radiation data to briefly lecture about how this radiation works and model how to decode the important parts of the spectra. I like to leave example drawings, notes, and calculations on the front board for the class period to help students by acting as reminders. After that introduction the lesson is split into two parts that students can do in either order.

Part 1 is the Black Body Radiation assignment itself. I expect that most students will work individually to read the spectra in the Data for the peak wavelength, calculate the temperature, and then determine the class of each star. However, most of my students collaborated in small groups which I was okay with too. After filling out the table about the example stars, students are tasked with increasingly difficult extension questions.

Part 2 is the demonstrations about black body radiation. I call them demonstrations, but I make the students do it themselves so they can use the Infrared thermometer. In the back of the room, I have some ice water, a hot plate, and a toaster oven. Students measure the ambient desk’s temperature and use the thermometer to measure the temperature of the ice water, hot plate as it is heating up, and the toaster oven at full blast to lead into a discussion about how the thermometer works by black body radiation. I like the toaster oven because it gets hot enough to begin to glow red as it’s thermal spectrum shifts enough into the visible range that we can see it with our eyes.

At the end of the hour, I split students into four groups to each be responsible for collaborating and sharing the answers to a quarter of the Black Body Radiation Hand out. This creates one last small group discussion task, a share out to the whole class, and a chance for students to check their work against other groups. I try to always plan in a way for students to get feedback about how well they did that day and what they missed.

Materials and Resources

• Black Body Radiation Data
• Black Body Radiation Hand out
• Black Body Radiation KEY
• Black Body Radiation Demonstration

Cooler and ice

Infrared Thermometer

Hot plate

Toaster or Toaster oven

Results

Like I said, my students mostly chose to collaborate in small groups when working through the data and calculating the temperature of the stars, which I am okay with. Especially since this creates more support for my multilingual students and more support for my math-struggling students. I liked the demonstrations in the back in small groups because it allowed for students to effectively use black body radiation, talk about it, and ask questions in a less intimidating small group setting; most of them had never thought about why things glow red when they get hot. When small groups created their whiteboards at the end, I heard a lot of sense-making about the topics they were responsible for. I was impressed by how quickly my students are picking up the science vocab; these students are definitely more proficient in English than their WIDA scores make them seem. I did notice that most students struggled with the very last question about three spectra on one graph, and needed to fix their drawing before turning it in. So next time I might scaffold that more or check in with people more beforehand to give individual help about that prompt in particular.

Student Artifacts

Day 4 - Redshift / Blueshift Stations

In this lesson students learn about different ways that astronomers interact with the concept of light redshifting and blueshifting, which is roughly the Doppler Effect applied to light waves. The lesson will start with a brief introduction set of slides, because while students should have learned about redshift in earth science they should need a quick review before using those concepts again today. After the review, students will be tasked with working in pairs to complete three stations that are all short tasks having to do with redshifting light. The stations are:

• Station 1: Examples of Redshifted Spectra from Galaxies, where they explore images of some of the first measured galaxies redshifting. Students will use those images to explore what redshift and blueshift looks like in spectra.

  

• Station 2: Calculating Velocities of Galaxies, where students will use simple spectra diagrams and a formula to calculate how fast and which direction galaxies are moving based on their redshift / blueshift.
• Station 3: Redshifting Galaxies from Universe Expansion, given Hubble’s law students calculate how far different galaxies must be from Earth in order to redshift it’s recorded amount.
• Station 4: Finding Exo-planets through Redshift - Blueshift, where students read about a technique to find exoplanets using the redshift / blueshift caused by the star’s motion.

While it does make the most sense to go in order for stations 1-3, I tell my students they can go in any order. Going over all the stations at the end would take too long in my opinion so I elected to jump straight to an exit ticket that asks them to mark what redshift and blueshift looks like in the spectra of different moving objects.

Materials and Resources

• Redshift / Blueshift Intro Slides
• Redshift / Blueshift Hand out
• Redshift / Blueshift KEY
• Redshift / Blueshift Stations
• Radial Velocity Method Article (This is for station 4)
• Redshift / Blueshift Exit Ticket
• Redshift / Blueshift Exit Ticket KEY

Results

I was worried about, but prepared for, my students to struggle with the math in this lesson. Today I learned that some of my students who struggle to read and write are pretty competent in math, so today was easier for them. Students seem to struggle the most with the first station. I did not edit the text about that data much, and I would recommend removing some of the academic language used in the description if you have multilingual students who need scaffolding; some of my native speaking students struggled to understand that station. Overall I was impressed at how well students worked together to problem solve, and the exit ticket was fairly easy for them after the intro slides introduced a similar concept at the beginning of the hour.

Student Artifacts

Day 5 - Scanning the Spectrum

This last lesson focuses on how different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum show us different objects in space. There is a great website called ESA Sky, where you can look up different objects and view them with different types of telescope imagery; switching between ultraviolet, infrared, and gamma wavelength photos as you please. It’s really powerful for showing students the value in different types of imagery. As well as letting them explore space in high quality graphics that most city dwellers couldn’t experience even with a nice telescope.

At first I ask my students to collect carefully selected data for two curated galaxies that I know have quality images for students to find. However, after students collect that data and make observations I then ask them to compare and contrast the two galaxies. For most of this unit, students were given various talk tasks but did not write much so I wanted to ask them to have a writing focus today. They are asked to summarize their findings in two paragraphs and then write a third paragraph contrasting the young and old galaxies. So not a large writing piece, but enough that they need to use their writing skills. The complexity and length of their writing should vary by the student’s writing skills, but all students should write about the young galaxy, about the old galaxy, and then compare and contrast the two. Here is the lesson plan if you want to see in detail what I planned.

I love this resource, but I definitely recommend modelling how to navigate it to look up objects and switch between different image types. That said, the data sets are incomplete. So if you want students to see good Xray images or Radio images, I recommend curating certain things for students to see as I did with this lesson.

Last, by curating which objects I want students to collect data from, explicitly asking them to use certain wavelengths, and creating a table sharing what each wavelength is most likely showing them, I am setting them up to have a much easier time writing paragraphs. The data collection phase at the beginning is asking them to do all the hard interpretation part in small steps, functionally scaffolding the intellectual labor of organizing their thoughts when summarizing in their paragraphs. Students might still need some help comparing and contrasting the two galaxies in their third paragraph, but I ask them to do that last so that students just stated what makes each unique so it should be easier to explain what makes them different. Taking a large task like writing paragraphs to compare and contrast two galaxies over multiple wavelengths and breaking it down into small achievable steps is a good way to help give multilingual students, as well as special education students, a structured task they are more likely to complete on their own.

Materials and Resources

• Scanning Across the Spectrum Hand out
• Scanning Across the Spectrum KEY
• Computer with Internet access

Results

Students are collecting data relatively easily about the two galaxies. It appears chunking the tasks and modeling how to use the website was successful in helping my students to independently engage with and complete the task. Most of my students combined their findings into three summary paragraphs at the end with relative ease. I feel like their overall work is good considering we have not focused on what galaxies are or how they work yet. That said, some of my students only wrote one paragraph or wrote incomplete paragraphs. I’m curious if this is because they did not understand the task, struggled to complete it, or if they were rushing. I wish I had a moderate to low English proficiency student in the room to see if the level of scaffolding and chunking in the assignment is enough to support them through writing their summary. That would help me diagnose why some of my students this year did not complete the assignment as outlined. I’m going to find some time to sit with them and ask what happened to learn more and see if I want to make changes for next year.

Student Artifacts