The Day the Lights Went Out in Spain

What happens when the world's biggest circuit breaks? This one-page activity uses a real, current event - the April 2025 blackout across Spain and Portugal - to make the idea of an open circuit vivid. The power grid is like one gigantic circuit that connects power plants to homes. When part of it failed, the loop broke, the electricity stopped, and about 60 million people lost power in seconds - just like a broken circuit.

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 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 the open-circuit idea concrete at the scale of a whole country
• Anchors circuits 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 an Electrical Circuits set: Context Clues, Inferences, Science in the News, the Conductor or Insulator? 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: electric circuits, open circuits, the power grid, electricity, and blackouts.

Standards: TEKS 6.8B (electrical circuits); NGSS DCI PS3.B (Conservation of Energy and Energy Transfer). Part of the Daily Science series by Workybooks.