Working with data, students develop 3-D understandings of Earth structures using inference to construct a block diagram from a collection of 2-D information.

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X-ray diffraction is a quick and valuable tool for identifying minerals. Minerals are an integral portion of our everyday life, in addition to composing our planet! They help bring electricity into our homes and remove our bathtub rings. In this lab, students analyze the X-ray diffraction patterns of three household cleansers, Ajax, White Magic, and Soft Scrub, in order to identify the abrasive minerals in each.

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This fun Web site is part of OLogy, where kids can collect virtual trading cards and create projects with them. Here, they learn about cladograms and the vast variety of dinosaurs that once roamed Earth. The activity opens by telling kids that there are more than 400 known species of extinct dinosaurs and by explaining how cladograms show their relationships to one another. Students then go to an interactive cladogram that has 19 dinosaur species. Each of the 19 dinosaurs includes a trading card with details about the species and its discovery, photographs, and interactive multiple-choice and "Fact or Fiction?" quizzes.

In this activity, students conduct an energy audit to determine how much carbon dioxide their family is releasing into the atmosphere and then make recommendations for minimizing their family's carbon footprint.

This is a collection of five short videos that show how climate change is affecting fishing, native populations and access for the oil and gas industry in the Arctic. The videos include personal reflections by writers Andrew C. Revkin and Simon Romero, scientists, and residents about their experience of the impacts of the climate change in the Arctic.

In this classroom activity, middle school students examine the wide-ranging sizes of dinosaurs. The activity opens with background information for teachers about the enormous range of dinosaur sizes. In a classroom discussion, students describe the size of some dinosaurs. Then, working from an existing grid, students create either a to-scale drawing of a Tyrannosaurus head or a life-size drawing of a Protoceratops.

This set of interactive data visualizations show the weather and climate events that have had the greatest economic impact on the US from 1980 to 2016.

This activity features a problem set designed to make students think carefully about the link between phase diagrams and textures.

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In this activity students work through a binary eutectic phase diagram in small groups and try to determine a set of generalizations that explain the behavior of such systems (e.g., "the first liquid produced upon heating is always the eutectic composition").

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This reference list has a dozen kid-friendly books on a wide range of biodiversity topics. For each title, the author, publisher, and publication date are included along with a brief description of the book. The list includes field guides and other reference books to help students begin exploring plants, insects, birds, and other living things, easy-to-complete activities to bring the importance of biodiversity home, and engaging stories that introduce students to cultural tales that celebrate biodiversity.

This reference list has more than 30 kid-friendly books on biodiversity. For each title, the author, publisher, and publication date are given. The diverse list includes field guides for identifying plants and insects, hands-on nature experiments and activities, photographic looks at the world's diverse species, and handbooks with tips about collecting and preserving specimens.

This diverse list of 13 multimedia resources can help you enhance the study of biodiversity in your classroom. For each resource, ordering information is provided. The list is divided into five categories: videos, magazines, posters, audio tapes, and other kits, units, and projects

Produced by the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, this brief guide summarizes for policymakers the consequences of biodiversity loss for human health, including threats to global supplies of food and fresh water, exposure to formerly rare diseases and opportunistic infections, and loss of important sources of medicines. The guide can be downloaded as a pdf at no charge.

This suite of short video clips is part of a series produced by the Switch Energy project. There are several video segments that discuss different perspectives of biofuels as a renewable source of energy.

This video provides an overview of the research of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) on converting biomass to liquid fuels.

This video segment from Evolution: "Extinction!" shows the impact of invasive species on native ecosystems.

This detailed chemistry lesson from the U.S. Department of Energy focuses on transforming vegetable oil into biodiesel through a process of transesterification. The process described offers a good model for many chemical reaction processes that are used to produce a viable product.

In this lab activity students generate their own biomass gases by heating wood pellets or wood splints in a test tube. They collect the resulting gases and use the gas to roast a marshmallow. Students also evaluate which biomass fuel is the best by their own criteria or by examining the volume of gas produced by each type of fuel.

This ZOOM video segment shows how to create a self-contained environment and explores evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.

This interactive resource adapted from NASA describes the different temperature, precipitation, and vegetation patterns in seven biomes: coniferous forest, temperate deciduous forest, desert, grassland, rainforest, shrubland, and tundra.