Heat Transfer Lesson Plan: Energy

*Click to open and customize your own copy of the Heat Transfer Lesson Plan.

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

Step 1: ACTIVATE PRIOR KNOWLEDGE

Ask students: 

• Why do you think hot things, like food, cool down?
• If you held a mug with a hot drink inside, what would you feel? Why do you think this is so?

Step 2: BUILD KNOWLEDGE

• Read aloud the description on the Heat Transfer topic page.
• Play the Movie, pausing to check for understanding. 
• Assign Related Reading. Have students read one of the two articles. Partner them with someone who read a different article to share what they learned with each other.
  

Step 3: APPLY and ASSESS 

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

Step 4: EXTEND and DEEPEN

Students express what they learned about heat transfer 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: Create a commercial promoting a thermos. In your commercial, answer this question: How does the thermos keep drinks hot? 
• Make-a-Map: Make a concept map defining the three types of heat transfer and give an example of each.
• Creative Coding: Code a newscast about today’s outside temperature, explaining how it will change throughout the day and night.

More to Explore

States of Matter: Basics Simulation: Students heat, cool and compress atoms and molecules to demonstrate how thermal energy affects states of matter.

Energy Unit: Continue to build understanding around energy forms with more BrainPOP science topics.

Teacher Support Resources:

• Pause Point Overview: Video tutorial showing how Pause Points actively engage students to stop, think, and express ideas. 
• Learning Activities Modifications: Strategies to meet ELL and other instructional and student needs.
• Learning Activities Support: Resources for best practices using BrainPOP.