4th Grade

This hands-on STEAM laboratory guides students through building a functional coin battery from everyday materials—pennies, nickels, and saltwater. Students investigate how chemical energy converts to electrical potential energy by constructing battery cells, measuring voltage with a voltmeter, and ultimately attempting to power an LED light. The lesson aligns with Alabama College and Career Ready Science Standards for Energy, requiring students to plan and carry out investigations demonstrating energy transfer and to design, construct, and test energy conversion devices.

This two-day engineering design challenge has students work in teams to design, construct, and test functional solar ovens capable of melting chocolate and marshmallows to make s’mores. Through hands-on experimentation, students investigate how different materials convert solar light energy into heat energy, applying the engineering design process to create, test, and iteratively improve their models. The lesson aligns with Alabama College and Career Ready Science Standard 4, which requires students to design, construct, and test devices that change energy from one form to another—specifically, passive solar heaters converting light energy into heat energy.

This language arts lesson uses solar energy content to develop oral presentation skills, complex sentence structures, and technical vocabulary mastery. Students learn to pronounce and use scientific terminology while explaining the five-step process of how solar panels convert sunlight into usable electricity. The lesson aligns with multiple Alabama College and Career Ready Language Arts Standards covering oral language presentation with complex sentences, reading informational text features (headings, photographs, illustrations, labels, charts), multisyllabic word decoding through syllable types, and speaking clearly with appropriate volume, pacing, and pronunciation while presenting organized information.

This interdisciplinary STEAM lesson explores biomimicry – the practice of learning from and imitating nature’s strategies to solve human design challenges. Students investigate how structural adaptations in plants and animals inspire technological innovations, with particular emphasis on how photosynthesis in plant leaves led to the development of solar panel technology. The lesson aligns with Alabama College and Career Ready Science Standards addressing how variations in species characteristics provide survival advantages and how internal and external structures function to support survival, growth, behavior, and reproduction.