SNC1W Unit 1: Thinking Like a Scientist

How do scientists and engineers find answers they can trust? Students sign a safety contract and learn the WHMIS 2015 pictograms, turn wonderings into testable questions, measure their reaction times with a falling ruler, run a paper-helicopter fair test, check viral science claims with SIFT, write their first Python program to analyse data, build paper towers in an engineering design challenge and research Canadian scientists from many communities. All data sets and scenarios are original, and every lab uses cheap, common materials.

Assessment of learning: an independent fair test investigation and lab report, with a rubric and five question options with safety notes.

Lessons

1. Welcome to the Lab
2. Asking Testable Questions
3. Measuring and Recording Data
4. The Fair Test Lab
5. Research Like a Scientist
6. Code the Data
7. Engineering Design Challenge
8. Who Does Science?

What you get

• A teacher lesson plan for every lesson: curriculum expectations, learning goals and success criteria, a timed sequence, differentiation, safety notes, look-fors and answer keys
• Detailed slideshows (15 to 17 slides per lesson) with speaker notes on every slide: what to say, what to ask, what to look for and how long to spend, plus warm-ups, worked examples, model answers and answer-key slides
• Student handouts, lab sheets and exit tickets
• Editable Word and PowerPoint files, plus PDFs
• A unit overview, the summative task and rubric, and a Lab Skills Kit for the whole year (safety contract, lab report template, graph paper and engineering design log)

Built for the 2022 Ontario Grade 9 Science curriculum (SNC1W, de-streamed), and easy to adapt for any Grade 9 science class.