Grade Levels: 3-5, 6-8

*Click to open and customize your own Electricity Lesson Plan.

This lesson accompanies the BrainPOP topic Electricity, and supports the standard of making observations to provide evidence that energy can be transferred from place to place by electric currents. Students demonstrate understanding through a variety of projects.

Step 1: ACTIVATE PRIOR KNOWLEDGE

Ask students:

  • What do you already know about electricity? How do you use electricity in your daily life?

Step 2: BUILD KNOWLEDGE

Step 3: APPLY and ASSESS 

Assign Electricity Quiz, prompting students to apply essential literacy skills while demonstrating what they learned about this topic.

Step 4: DEEPEN and EXTEND

Students express what they learned about electricity while practicing essential literacy skills with one or more of the following activities. Differentiate by assigning ones that meet individual student needs.

  • Make-a-Movie: Produce a mini documentary explaining the impact of Michael Faraday’s discovery about motion and electricity.
  • Make-a-Map: Identify types of electricity and provide real-world examples of each.
  • Creative Coding: Code a comic about Benjamin Franklin’s discovery that lightning is an electric charge.

More to Explore 

Sortify: Current Electricity: ​​Challenge players to sort by attributes, such as parts of a circuit, uses of electricity, and more in this learning game.  

Related BrainPOP Topics: Deepen understanding of energy and its transformations with these topics: Current Electricity, Static Electricity, and Electric Circuits.

Teacher Support Resources: