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Gallery Walk Questions about Energy and Material Cycles
Students state the physical, chemical or biological processes associated with these environments: Pelagic ocean zone, California coat Cave, Indiana Barrier island beach, North Carolina Sand dune, Dunes National Park, Colorado Wetland and...
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Global Warming Statistics
Students research real-time and historic temperature data of U.S. and world locations, and analyze the data using mean, median, and mode averages. They graph the data and draw conclusions by analyzing the data. A spreadsheet is used to...
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Shedding Light on the Weather with Relative Humidity
Learners study weather using a graphing calculator in this lesson. They collect data for temperature and relative humidity for every hour over a day from the newspaper, then place the data in their handheld calculator and examine it for...
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Bowen's Reaction Serives: Magma Differentiation
Young scholars investigate the differentiation of magma to form different minerals present in a rock. By using the model proposed by Bowen, they determine the depth, temperature, and composition of magma. Students explain why some...
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Reasons for Seasons
Students model the tilt of the Earth as it orbits the Sun. They explain the meaning and characteristics of solstices and equinoxes. They explain that sunlight hits the Earth at different angles at different locations over the course of...
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Weather
Students explore the earth's atmosphere, weather, and climate. They begin class with a discussion about weather patterns, atmosphere, and the layers of the earth. After the class discussion, students rotate through four stations to...
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How Pollution Disrupts Our Natural Environment
Students conduct experiments to illustrate global warming. For this air pollution lesson, students first examine how a layer of greenhouse gasses might impact the earth's atmospheric temperature, then evaluate how the layer of gasses...
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The Important Role of Biomes
Travel the world from the comfort of your classroom with this unit on the Earth's biomes.
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Clouds
Test your students' science and/or reading comprehension skills with this activity, which provides a page of information about clouds and cloud classification. Both an earth science teacher and a language arts teacher could use this...
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The Climate Change Skeptic's Argument: Natural Solar Cycles or Human Activity?
Teachers explore patterns in sunspots and total solar irradiance to understand the counterpoint to the human effect of global warming. In this professional development tool, teachers work through a lesson plan on the sun's natural...
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Differences between Climate and Weather
Students collect weather data over weeks, graph temperature data and compare the temperature data collected with averaged climate data where they live.
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What's A Water Column Profile?
Students investigate water column data. In this earth science and seawater lesson, students determine how temperature, salinity, and density have an impact on sea water by viewing and analyzing data obtained from a number of websites....
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Water Layering and Circulation
Students examine relationships and interactions between different types of water. They experiment with colored water of different temperature and salinity and discuss how the results relate to real ocean currents.
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Wind Power
Fourth graders develop an understanding of how engineers use wind to generate electricity. They will build a model anemometer to better understand and measure wind speed. They discover that engineers design wind turbines that generate...
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The Changing Atmosphere of Pluto
In this atmosphere of Pluto worksheet, high schoolers use an equation for the orbit of Pluto to determine the semi-major axis, the semi-minor axis, the ellipticity of the orbit, the aphelion and the perihelion. They also determine the...
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How Oceans Affect Climate
Students draw conclusions about how the ocean affects temperature. In this weather lesson, students use the Internet to gather data to help them come to a conclusion about how the climate in a certain region is directly affected by the...
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Weather
Students recognize that carbon dioxide's role in the greenhouse effect. They research the greenhouse effect to design and create a greenhouse structure to measure the changing temperatures over a 24-hour period. In addition, they write a...
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Seasons
Learners investigate the reason for seasons on Earth during three activities. They construct a model of the Earth and Sun to identify patterns in the changes of the angle of light on the Earth's surface. Then they conduct a heat...
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Astronomy and Me: Moons Over New Haven
Third graders study the features of different moons orbiting the planets. In this astronomy lesson, 3rd graders explore the different phases of the moon using an interactive online website. They compare and contrast the features of the...
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Analysis of Atmospheric Conditions for a High Mountain Retreat
Students examine the relationship between altitude, atmospheric pressure, temperature and humidity at a particular location. They practice science and math in real world applications. They write reports detailing their scientific...
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Local Weather And Location
Students explain how uneven heating of Earth affects wind and water currents. They describe the limits on current technology in predicting weather and how the Water Cycle is related to local weather.
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The Webb Space Telescope: Detecting Dwarf Planets
In this detecting dwarf planets worksheet, students read about the Webb Space Telescope that will be launched in 2014 to detect dwarf planets using an infrared telescope. Students solve 3 problems and create a graph for each using given...
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The Science of Changing Seasons
Students explore basic principles of seasonal change, ponder the mechanisms that drive these changes, and perform experiments that show what causes the earth to heat differently during different seasons.
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Weather Internet Scavenger Hunt
In this earth science worksheet, students visit the weather sites listed to answer the weather questions on the sheet. They define super cell and complete the paragraph. Students also name and sketch three types of snowflakes.