Militaries throughout history have used topography information to plan strategies, yet many pupils today don't understand it. Scholars use Legos and a contour gauge to understand how to construct and visualize topographic profiles. This...

Use science to solve the mystery of the Poplar murder. Pupils use forensic botany to determine if a suspect could be the killer. By analyzing images from a Transmission Electron Microscope, learners determine if the material found on the...

Sharpen your pencil and grab a ruler, it's time to draw some quadrilaterals! Given the definition of a parallelogram, rectangle, and rhombus, learners draw examples and nonexamples of each figure. The three definitions are...

High school physical scientists collide with motion. They work in pairs to design a paper car that will protect a raw egg during a head-on collision. Measurements of distance traveled, time of run, vehicle specs, and photo gate flags are...

Try to figure out what happens with shadows as a person moves between two light sources. A formative assessment lesson has individuals work on an assessment task based on similar triangles, then groups them based on their...

Apply the concept of magnitude to estimate values and compare numbers. The ninth lesson of the 15-part series asks learners to write numbers to their next greatest power of 10 and then make comparisons. Scholars begin to understand the...

Study the chemistry of mining! Through nine lessons in the unit, learners explore different concepts related to mining. Their study ranges from rock and mineral analysis to the environmental impact of dynamite and the chemical reaction...

Need a comprehensive test about global history and geography? Look no further!  Test young historians' understanding of how to use primary sources to formulate answers with an assessment that uses multiple-choice questions that...

Whose home is it anyway? Design teams plan a housing development in which they must also protect a native species. The teams consist of a project manager, civil engineer, environmental engineer, and graphic designer. Teams present their...

Find out how much your earth scientists learned about the atmosphere in the unit on global atmospheric change with this assessment. After writing a letter to persuade others to make changes to protect our atmosphere, pupils take the same...

Plants provide a variety of delicious foods essential for human survival. In the fourth lesson of this series on food science, young scientists investigate common fruits, vegetables, and grains in order to determine which plant part is...

Young scientists track Hurricane Katrina across the Atlantic Ocean as they learn about these destructive forces of nature. Provided with a table of data tracking the location and conditions of Katrina over a one week span, students...

Asking questions about the text is an important way for kids to become critical readers. Use a QAR activity based on The Devil's Arithmetic to help learners decipher between questions that are right there, between the author and the...

Compare and contrast reading passages with the ever favorite story of Cinderella. The versions in focus include an Italian version and a Native American story followed by three questions designed to share similarities and...

Household materials can be used for more than cleaning! In this collaborative experiment, emerging chemists use products such as vinegar and liquid antacid to explore chemical reactions that commonly occur in the human body.

Searching for an eccentric way to enhance lessons on ecosystems while ensuring pupils remain creative and motivated? Upon viewing The Lorax by Dr. Seuss, designated groups design and construct a pop-up book that...

Complex solutions are not always simple to find. In the fourth lesson of the unit, the class extends their understanding of complex numbers in order to solve and check the solutions to a rational equation presented in the first lesson....

Class members perform complex operations on a plane in the 17th segment in the 32-part series. Learners first verify that multiplication by the reciprocal does the same geometrically as it does algebraically. The class then circles back...

The Hopewell people of the central Ohio Valley used right triangles in the construction of earthworks. Pupils use the Pythagorean Theorem to determine missing dimensions of right triangles used by the Hopewell people. The assessment task...

This Groundhog's Day, challenge scholars to predict, estimate, tally, and graph in a weather-themed lesson in which class members play the role of the groundhog to forecast the weather come February second. 

Technology—what exactly is it? Find out with a project designed to inspire the inner inventor in us all. The activity begins with a captivating podcast and a search of multiple websites that display different inventions and technology,...

Show the class the world as they've never seen it before—from way above! Learners try to unravel the mysteries presented by rich satellite imagery, learn to interpret topographic maps, and study erosion by constructing their very...

All sodium carbonate may not have the same amount of carbonate, but it should have the same percent. Learners write and balance an equation to predict the chemical reaction between sodium carbonate and zinc acetate. Through the lab...

What better way to learn how to use a microscope than building your own? A lab investigation has scholars use lenses from magnifying glasses and sheets of cork to design their own compound microscopes. They calculate focal length...