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Illnois River and Lake Mussel Habitat Diorama Activity
Learners identify the environmental elements of river and lake mussels. They compare the elements to the time before settlement and during industrialization. They also participate in a field trip to a mussel exhibit.
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Mussel Anatomy Lesson Plan
Students identify the parts and functions of a mussel. They explain how its physical adaptations help it survive in its habitat. They label the parts as a quiz to complete the lesson.
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Minerals- the Building Blocks of Rocks
Students investigate how rocks are composed minerals by dissecting rock cookies.
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Igneous Rocks
Second graders examine igneous rocks in this lesson. They discuss the rock cycle and how rocks form. They also explore volcanic activities and build their own volcano.
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Sediment Sleuths
Students classify sediments based on their physical characteristics, such as size, shape and color. They identify and describe rocks and minerals that are common to their region of the state.
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Spider Anatomy Lesson: Is It a Spider?
Students review information on a website which shows different types of spiders. They sort images of spiders from other insects. They create their own spider out of materials and share them with their classmates.
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Spider Poems: The Spider and the Fly
Students review the information they gathered on different websites to write a poem about spiders. They use other websites to gain more information if needed. They share their poem with the class.
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Forest Activity: Forest Layers
Students examine the forest layers and types of forests. They explore a website, read content on forest layers and the effects of environmental conditions, sumarize the characteristics of a forest type and present the information to the...
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Physical Adaptations in Ice Age Mammals
Students identify the body parts in Ice Age mammals that allowed them to survive. They answer questions as a class and discuss. They examine photographs of the animals as well.
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The Spider and the Fly
Students incorporate the knowledge they learned about spiders on the ISM Web site, Spider Collection, and other Web sites they viewed on
spiders to write a rhyming poem (possibly choosing a poem type illustrated here) about an aspect of...
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Side by Side: Butterfly Wings and Symmetry
Students observe butterfly images and then draw and paint their own design. They use this activity to explain symmetry.
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Dinosaur Prints
Students examine dinosaur footprints and compare them to the shape of elephant footprints and to the size of their own footprints.
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What Big Teeth You Have:
Students make their own tooth impressions of a sharp and a flat tooth and compare the differences. They make impression of fossil teeth from dinosaurs comparing the sharp and flat teeth and learning about their uses.
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Footprint Detectives: Making Inferences Using Dinosaur Trackways
Young scholars analyze and discuss footprints and dinosaur tracks. They listen to books about paleontologists, create and analyze their own trackways using black paper and chalk, examine the data, and form hypotheses about footprints and...
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Hide and Seek with Bones: A Mapping and Scaling Comparison
Students examine and simulate how paleontologists map objects. They hide and find objects using a grid to map the objects' placements.
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Designasaurus: Modeling Activity for a Paleoartist
Students create and draw fictional dinosaurs. They write a description of their dinosaur.
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A Lab Demonstration: Three dimensional view of soft internal structures of bony material
Students discuss the structures of a bone and observe a demonstration of bony materials.
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A Phylogenetic Perspective for the Cladistically Challenged
Students use M&Ms to simulate radioactive decay of elements.
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Creating a Leaf Collection and Classroom Herbarium
Students categorize leaves they collect from trees outdoors by consulting a variety of sources. They discuss how the form of a leaf reflects its adaptation to its environment.
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Exploring Rocks
Students collect and examine rocks. They record information about the rocks they have collected in their notebooks. They compare and contrast different rocks and complete a class chart at the end of the lesson.
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Dig It Up
Students participate in an archaeological excavation to determine how archeologists make inferences about various cultures. They reconstruct the site using layers of drawings. They discuss the kinds of information they learned.
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Discussion of Adaptation
Students discuss ways in which dinosaurs adapted to their environments. They apply the same logic to an analysis of human habitat, survival needs, and survival need fulfillment to explain how people have adapted to their environment.
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Environmental Hazards
Students identify environmental hazards on a simulated field trip. They analyze the exposure and suggest methods to eliminate or reduce exposure to toxic sources.
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Exploring Minerals
Students examine the differences between rocks and minerals. They discover the properties of different minerals and perform hardness tests on minerals. They collect their data and make observations.