Inquiry Builder
A complete NGSS inquiry lesson plan in 5 minutes for you to tailor to your needs!
Tell the Inquiry Builder what you're working with;
your grade, topic, available materials, and time. It finds the phenomenon, aligns the standards, and builds the lesson. Free.
HOW IT WORKS
Enter your constraints. The Inquiry Builder generates four distinct phenomenon-based lesson options aligned to NGSS Performance Expectations. Select the direction that fits your class. Get a complete, print-ready lesson plan — learning targets, investigation phases, discussion prompts, formative assessment, and a student graphic organizer. Ready to run.
No account required. No template to fill in. No generic output. Yours to keep and edit.
Works with what you have
The materials you list are what the lesson is built around, not a hypothetical set of lab equipment. Poker chips, index cards, paper airplanes, animal figurines, whatever is actually in your room becomes the investigation. Teachers who work with limited resources or who need something for tomorrow have found this particularly useful.
Grounded in real standards
Every lesson is aligned to Performance Expectations and Disciplinary Core Ideas. Standards appear in full, the complete PE statement, the DCI connection, and the three-dimensional alignment summary, so you can evaluate the alignment yourself rather than taking the tool's word for it.
Print and go
The output is a formatted document. Review it, edit anything that needs adjusting, and print. The student graphic organizer is included and prints cleanly on a separate page.