A lesson plan to engage students with the topic of living/nonliving things. Involves SMART technology, cooperative learning, UDL, and virus research.

1. Living vs Nonliving
Things
A Modified Lesson Plan

2. Target Learners
For this lesson, my target learners would be biology students in a high school context. This lesson
would be towards the beginning of the year as students would be starting their journey into the
study of living things. Most likely, this lesson would be for freshmen and sophomores.

3. SMART Lesson: Engage
http://exchange.smarttech.com/details.html?id=e58b319b-deca-4345-933c-f9f8f2ef9706
This SMART Lesson would be a good intro into students determining some factors of living versus nonliving
things.

4. Next Steps: Explore
Set up the “Living vs Nonliving Things” activity by laying out different items that represent aspects of living
things. Have students go from station to station to try and determine what each item might represent
about living things. An example would be one of the “grow a dinosaur” toys, with another one submerged
in water that has actually grown. This would represent GROWTH, one of the 7 key aspects of living things.

5. Explain
Have students come up with a list of the 7 characteristics of living things in their own words. The focus
should be on:
1. Movement
2. Respiration
3. Sensitivity
4. Growth
5. Reproduction
6. Excretion
7. Nutrition

6. Elaborate
Next, students will use their definition of living things to research a hot topic--is a virus living or nonliving?
Students will be assigned a “side” and will research based on the 7 characteristics of living things. Students
will then have to come into class for a full-class debate about whether or not viruses are alive.

7. Evaluate
Finally, students will take a quiz on living versus nonliving things, their characteristics, and the qualities of
viruses!

8. How this applies UDL
-students are using multiple formats of learning (hands on, games on smartboard, etc.)
-students are using technology, which allows for easier acommodation individually
-students are being assessed in multiple ways as they apply the knowledge to things they handle on a day to
day basis