This lesson plan from the Levin Center at Wayne State University is about Defining Congressional Oversight. This resource includes a downloadable document (PDF), embedded video, and images.The lesson plan also includes a Spanish version.
Learners will use trays of sand and cups of water to recreate surface features seen in images of Mars. This is activity 5 of 9 in Mars and Earth: Science Learning Activities for After School.
This video segment adapted from A Science Odyssey tells the story of researcher Sir Alexander Fleming, whose luck and scientific reasoning led to the groundbreaking discovery of penicillin.
Does Democracy Matter in My Life?- Own It! Handbook is the guide book for a transformative after-school, trauma-informed enrichment program. It provides five lessons & activities about essential elements of American democracy since the 1780s. Own It! also nurtures academic skills, personal growth and leadership. It uses history to connect our past to our future, as part of the Own Your History® (OYH) Collection. But Own It! is not “school” and it differs from traditional approaches to history. Own It! helps students learn more about themselves, as well as their community and the country. Own It! enhances students’ engagement in being creative, making things happen, and achieving goals. Its mission is to help them step up and enrich their lives, especially by understanding that they live in history.
This activity foregrounds African American historical experiences in the history of the state of Minnesota. Students will navigate multiple historical websites and consult primary historical texts. By synthesizing these primary texts, they will identify a common theme related to Dred or Harriet Scott. Then students will analyze the historical importance of that theme in Minnesota history more broadly.
DATA: NASA Aura nitrogen dioxide data. TOOL: Google Earth. SUMMARY: Learn about photochemical smog. Explore the relationships among human population density, nitrogen dioxide concentrations, and geography.
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DATA: MODIS Imagery. TOOL: ImageJ. SUMMARY: Examine images of the Aral Sea from 1973 through 2003. Use image analysis software to measure changes in the width and area of the freshwater lake over time.
(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)
In this activity, students play the roles of "time travel agents" creating an advertisement for a geologic time period which has been assigned to them. They will use the Earth Science Reference Tables (available on the internet) to learn some basic facts about their assigned period. A rubric for assessing student understanding is provided.
This Web site, created to complement the Einstein exhibit, looks at the life and contributions of this extraordinary scientist and humanitarian.
An historical overview of the origins of the U.S. Electoral College
This is a lesson that applys occultations to Saturn's Moon Enceladus. Learners will establish whether Saturn’s small moon, Enceladus, has an atmosphere, whether that atmosphere is over the entire planet, and what creates Saturn’s E-ring. The activity is part of Project Spectra, a science and engineering program for middle-high school students, focusing on how light is used to explore the Solar System.
This energy game activity engages students in learning about energy sources. This game demonstrates that energy, the environment, and economics are closely tied together. During the course of the game and in the discussion afterward, students learn the concepts of scarcity, opportunity cost, net energy profit, law of diminishing returns, and that availability does not mean usefulness.
Under the "The Science Behind Harry Potter" theme, a succession of diverse complex scientific topics are presented to students through direct immersive interaction. Student interest is piqued by the incorporation of popular culture into the classroom via a series of interactive, hands-on Harry Potter/movie-themed lessons and activities. They learn about the basics of acid/base chemistry (invisible ink), genetics and trait prediction (parseltongue trait in families), and force and projectile motion (motion of the thrown remembrall). In each lesson and activity, students are also made aware of the engineering connections to these fields of scientific study.
This zine is comprised of four main sections: (1) a history of natural resource inequalities in NYC and the goals of environmental justice; (2) the importance of effective waste management with ways to reduce waste in your community; (3) a breakdown of legislative influence and how to get involved in local politics to further environmental justice; and (4) a collection of environmental groups and resources across NYC. An online version of this resource exists at ourcityplanetfuture.wordpress.com. That site also has a link to a printable version of the zine.
In this online activity, learners discover how random variation influences biological evolution. Biological evolution is often thought of as a process by which adaptation is generated through selection.Œć While it is recognized that random variation underlies the process, emphasis is usually placed on selection and resulting adaptation, leaving a sense that it is selection that drives evolution.Œć This simulation highlights the creative role of random variation, offering a somewhat different perspective: that of evolution as open-ended exploration driven by randomness and constrained by selection, with adaptation as a dynamic, transient consequence rather than an objective.
This online article provides a firsthand report of Ernest Shackleton's epic 800-mile ocean crossing. In 1914, Shackleton planned to cross the continent of Antarctica from one sea to the other. One day's sail away from the continent, his specially constructed ship, the Endurance, was trapped in pack ice; 281 days later, crushed, the boat sank. The fifty-six-man crew survived as castaways on the ice for five months, after which Shackleton led them some 180 miles to the relative safety of Elephant Island. He and five men then embarked on an epic, 800-mile ocean crossing to South Georgia Island, the nearest inhabited area, in a twenty-two-foot lifeboat called the James Caird. This article is an account of that journey.
In this activity, student teams conduct a quantitative exploration of the connections between parts of the Earth system, through examination of a time series of environmental data maps. By investigating the connections between environmental data, they see how Earth processes interact on varying time and spatial scales.This is one of six interrelated learning activities in the student activity guide associated with the GLOBE Earth System Poster, “Exploring Connections in Year 2007.” A series of assessment and extension activities are included.
This is a lesson about using analogues to look for life on other planets. Learners will use the results of previous lessons to write a scientific proposal to explore another planet or moon in our solar system for signs of life. This proposal should predict the types of energy and nutrients available to sustain life and describe equipment and instruments necessary for exploration and characterization of the target environment. This is activity 4, the capstone activity, in Exploring Deep-Subsurface Life. Earth Analogues for Possible Life on Mars: Lessons and Activities.
Student teams explore atmospheric aerosols, dust, and fires and their impact on the Earth's albedo using NASA Earth Observations (NEO) website. This is an extension activity in the student learning activity guide accompanying the GLOBE Earth System Poster, Exploring Connections in Year 2007. A series of six learning activities and associated assessment activities are included.
In this activity, student teams explore the connections between parts of the Earth system by examining a time series of environmental data maps. They observe that the environment is the result of the interplay among many processes that take place on varying time and spatial scales, by looking at different six different variables during a single month: insolation, surface temperature, cloud fraction, aerosols, precipitation and biosphere (surface vegetation). This is one of six interrelated learning activities in the student activity guide associated with the GLOBE Earth System Poster, Exploring Connections in Year 2007. A series of assessment and extension activities are included. GLOBE (Global Learning and Observation to Benefit the Environment) is a worldwide, hands-on, K-12 school-based science education program. GLOBE (Global Learning and Observation to Benefit the Environment) is a worldwide, hands-on, K-12 school-based science education program.