Scientists Are Building a Star on Earth

How do you make energy the way the Sun does? This one-page activity uses a real, current breakthrough - nuclear fusion - to bring one form of energy to life. Deep in the Sun, tiny atoms fuse and release nuclear energy, the energy stored in the center of atoms. Now scientists are copying the Sun with powerful lasers, and in 2022 (and many times since) got more energy out than they put in.

What's Included

• 1 student page: a short news story plus four cards (What's the Story? multiple choice with a quick true/false, a fill-in energy chain with word bank, Cause & Effect matching, and a Why Does It Matter? sentence starter)
• 1 teacher key page with every answer, a sample response, the standards box, clickable links to the source articles, and a science-connection summary
• Letter-size PDF, no prep

How It Helps You Teach

• Makes nuclear energy - the hardest form to picture - concrete and exciting
• Anchors the forms of energy in a real, current event students find fascinating
• The article links support media literacy and let you show students the source

Pair It With

Part of a Forms of Energy set: Context Clues, Inferences, Science in the News, the Which Form of Energy? sort, and a Reading in Science. Check out our library for the rest.

Perfect for 6th grade physical science, a current-events science reading and reading comprehension activity, science literacy, and TEKS 6.8B review. Topics include: nuclear energy, nuclear fusion, forms of energy, and energy.

Standards: TEKS 6.8B (forms of energy); NGSS DCI PS3.A (Definitions of Energy). Part of the Daily Science series by Workybooks.