Curated OER
Environmentally Friendly Home
Learners discuss ways to make homes more environmentally friendly. They comprehend ways to reduce home resource consumption, such as passive solar heating, insulation, and geothermal heating and cooling
Curated OER
Ocean Currents
Learners discover the geography of Earth by analyzing water currents. In this oceanography lesson, students create visual references on a map of the globe where and why major ocean currents are moving water. Learners conduct...
Curated OER
Circle of Life
Students consider why we eat and where our food obtains its energy. They illustrate food chains that might be found on an open field, dissect owl pellets, identify the remains of animals in the pellets, watch videos and participate in...
Curated OER
Global Winds
Students extend their understanding of convection to consider global winds and the effect of the earth's rotation on the creation of patterns of prevailing wind direction.
Curated OER
National Gallery of Art: Jackson Pollock
Young scholars paint a picture in the style of Jackson Pollock. In this painting lesson, students learn about Jackson Pollock and the method that he used to create his famous pieces of art. Young scholars use objects other than...
Curated OER
Atmospheric Cells
Young scholars recognize that the sun is the source of energy driving atmosphere cells. They relate the motion of the atmospheric cells to mantle convection cells. Students recognize that the function of atmospheric cells is to move heat...
Curated OER
Current Interactions
Students design an experiment to see how wind, temperature, and salinity work together to influence ocean currents and present it in a report format. They explain to their classmates how experiment findings relate to ocean currents.
Curated OER
Fallout!
Students plot the locations of fallout from two disasters that polluted much of the world's air. They plot the ash fallout from the 1980 Mt. St. Helen's eruption to see what the wind patterns in the United States look like overall. Next...
Columbia University
The Climate System: Atmospheric Forces, Balances, and Weather Systems
The large scale horizontal flow of air in the atmosphere is driven by the imbalance of net radiation over the globe. This resource introduces us to the physical laws governing the horizontal motion of air. It also describes types of...
University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
Ucar: Modeling How Air Moves
In this activity, middle schoolers use models to observe that air is a fluid that flows due to temperature-driven density differences.