What do Prairie Chickens Need in Order to Survive Today's Prairie?

This middle school unit covering ecosystems, animal behavior and symbiosis was developed through the Storyline approach. Middle school students will be figuring out why prairie chickens have a very unique dance and understand the role cows play to help ensure the dance takes place. Using this approach, students engage in science concepts to help ensure the survival of the prairie chicken.

Our project involves students learning about the values of a natural area in their community and producing a public service announcement and map to show its value and how it could be developed.

Food waste is a major contributor to greenhouse gas. Wasted food and the resources to produce that food are responsible for approximately 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. In this storyline, students learn about the resources required to produce food through following the carbon cycle and discover how food waste contributes to climate change. They will also learn the farm to table transport chain as well as how to conduct a food waste audit. Finally, the students will research solutions to the problem of food waste that can be applicable to their own lives, their school, and their community. 

El desperdicio de comida es un contribuyente mayor a los gases de efecto invernadero. La comida desperdiciada y los recursos usados en su producción son responsables por aproximadamente 8% de las emisiones globales de gases de efecto invernadero. En este caso, los estudiantes aprenderán sobre los recursos requeridos para producir comida siguiendo el ciclo del carbón y descubrirán cómo el desperdicio de comida contribuye al cambio climático. También aprenderán sobre la cadena de transporte de la granja a la mesa y cómo conducir una auditoría de desperdicio de comida. Finalmente, investigarán soluciones al problema de desperdicio de comida que pueden aplicar a sus propias vidas, su escuela y su comunidad.

This short activity provides a way to improve understanding of a frequently-published diagram of global carbon pools and fluxes. Students create a scaled 3-D visual of carbon reservoirs and the movement of carbon between reservoirs.

Hundreds of scientific articles. Written for middle and high school students. Approved by scientists. Free.

Through a gardening activity, students will use their knowledge of growth to determine the effect of gravity on plant growth.

Astronaut Peggy Whitson helps out with a gardening activity that you could do at home or in the classroom.

Students will be able to display their understanding of robotics by sharing their robotic hand.

This classroom activity is aimed at an understanding of different ecosystems by understanding the influence of temperature and precipitation. Students correlate graphs of vegetation vigor with those of temperature and precipitation data for four diverse ecosystems, ranging from near-equatorial to polar, and spanning both hemispheres to determine which climatic factor is limiting growth.

This lesson was developed to give participants an understanding of Earth's water cycle. In this one-hour long activity, students participate in a webquest to learn about the water cycle, and then build a mini-model of the water cycle to observe how water moves through Earth's four systems. The activity uses the 5E instructional model and is part of the "Survivor Earth" series of one-hour lessons.