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Parks Canada - True to Our Nature
Learners discuss visits to national parks, the differences between national parks and other parks, and plan an ecologically friendly trip to several parks that emphasizes conservation and national heritage.
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Clean Coal?
Learners determine, based on their knowledge of coal pollutants, the effectiveness of clean-coal technologies. They state and defend a position on whether power plants in the United States should be required to upgrade to available...
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Final Project Presentations: Water Quality
Students synthesize the information they have been researching on water quality to evaluate the potential health risks in a region with arsenic contamination. They prepare and present a persuasive speech that incorporates visuals.
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Glaciers Leave Their Imprint
Pupils study various types of glaciers and the landforms they create. Working in pairs, they research a type of glacial landform and construct a calendar page illustrating and describing it. The pages be compiled to create a class calendar.
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"Home Sweet Home?"
Students research an endangered animal's habitat, investigate the survival problems. They research the animal's zoo life. They research some programs of reintroduction and chart the pros and cons of each.
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A Community Decision!
Students investigate waste management through a simulated role-playing activity. They use a decision chart to organize their presentatioins and justify their decisions.
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Your Blooming Pond
Young scholars model a pond system that becomes enriched with nutrients (fertilizer). They manipulate variables, make observations over time, and draw conclusions that may lead to further inquiry. They, in groups, simulate a pond...
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Carpooling and the Environment
Students investigate carpooling and determine to what extent it occurs in their community for a carpool challenge. In groups, students create a survey then collect, calculate and record data to determine how much pollution could be...
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Water Density Boundaries
Learners create observable layers in water that represent a separation based upon density differences. They model density boundaries using differences in temperature and salinity. They, in groups, perform a meaningful experiment...
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Performance Standards/Competencies
Students research how children dressed during Colonial times. Students design and create life-sized likenesses of themselves, dressing the paper dolls in colonial dress.
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Kincaid Creatures
Young scholars brainstorm a list of nocturnal and diurnal wild animals they see in their community and discuss how the animals would be different if they were living during the Ice Age. Using a handout, they discover how archeologists...
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How Things Fly
Students observe photographs of selected twentieth-century aircraft at the National Air and Space Museum and note differences in the design of aircraft wings, fuselages, and engines.
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Pictures Telling Stories
Students see the importance of primary sources in the study of history, but also the limitations of relying only on primary sources of taking the money, as it were, at face value.
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Creatures from Planet X: Spiders
Students are given a description of some fascinating animals from "Planet X". They follow the descriptions given to illustrate one of these animals paying careful attention to introduced vocabulary such as 'appendages', 'receptors', and...
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Spy on a Spider
Students view slides or live specimens to name and describe the distinguishing features of groups of arthropods, especially spiders and insects. They complete worksheets, observe webs and then search for and record where spiders can be...
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Color It Recycled!
Pupils melt old crayon stubs and mold them into interesting shapes and characters. They can add paper clips to created hanging ornaments!
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Let's Put a Spin on Things: Graffiti Role Play
Fourth graders examine what is and what isn't graffiti. They role-play various scenarios, research the Graffiti Hurts website, and discuss when graffiti should be reported to local law enforcement.
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Arbor Day Across the United States
Students perform research about hardiness zones used to guide planting. They read a hardiness zone color-key map and create their own color-key maps to show when different states celebrate Arbor Day.
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Lewis and Clark: The Language of Discovery
Students replicate some of the trailblazing methods of Lewis and Clark on a fifteen-minute "writing journey" through the school or neighborhood.
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How Things Fly
Students, by drawing on their own experiences, discuss and examine the basic physics of flight. They participate in a variety of activities regarding flight.
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Money Talks
Students move from fact finding to interpretation as they examine paper money from the time of the American Revolution. In the final exercise, they use the issue dates of the bills to construct a chronology of political changes during...
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Trash...it really piles up!
Students investigate a contemporary "midden" by analyzing trash collected from various sources and determining life-style choices people make. They see that reducing the amount of waste we generate is helpful to the the environment.
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Decomposers at Work!
Students design and conduct investigations that illustrate the process of decomposition. After a lecture/demo, students simulate the process of soil composting in the classroom. They closely chart the decomposition of their soil.
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Investigating Endangered Species
Learners pick an endangered animal to research and report their findings to the class.