Explore the habitats around you with an activity that takes kids out of the classroom to learn about the local variety of habitats and the living things that call them home. In small groups, scholars investigate their surroundings,...

What's the least number of colors needed to color a U.S. map? The lesson begins by having pupils view a video clip on continuous and discrete phenomenon, then launches into an activity reminiscent of Zeno's paradox. A separate video...

Students engage in an interactive Internet lesson covering the reasons and results of earthquakes. After reading eyewitness accounts and viewing animations, they use seismograms to measure and locate the epicenters. In an ongoing study,...

Groundwater is an essential natural resource, not to mention a fascinating topic to study. Here is a series of twelve amazing lessons on the water source and how we use it in our daily lives. Concepts require higher math and physics...

New Horizons began its journey to Pluto in 2006. Ten years later, it continues its mission. In that time, scholars have surely grown, but how much more will they grow by the time New Horizons reaches its destination? Find out with an...

Learners apply knowledge of soil, environmental impacts, economics, multiple human demands, and use given data for a proposed scenario in making land use decisions. They debate land use issues and/or scenarios and discuss a case study.

How do oceanographers make maps under water? Junior explorers discover the technologies and processes involved in creating bathymetric maps in part three of a five-part series designed for fifth- and sixth-grade pupils. The lesson...

Using the Cartesian coordinate system, future flight experts plot points to determine whether or not an airplane will fly. With the four forces of weight, lift, drag, and thrust represented in different quadrants, your physics learners...

Physics stars will enjoy learning about the conservation of energy as you demonstrate gyroscope precession. The lecture is broken into five subtopics: cross product, rotating vectors, angular momentum, rotating rigid bodies, and torque...

A bite of bits. The first lesson plan in a unit of 15 introduces the class to the byte. Pupils learn about other standard units for measuring file sizes, develop an understanding of relative sizes and the kind of units used to...

Speaking of the Internet. The culminating lesson for the unit on the Internet challenges pupils to prepare short, two-minute speeches on an issue facing society. The pupils chose from three topics that connect the Internet and...

The second lesson in a unit of 15 introduces pupils to text compression. The class begins with discussing how they already use text compression when sending text messages. Pairs learn more about the subject as they work to compress a...

Data, data everywhere. Challenge your class to begin thinking about data, the ways people collect information, and what we can learn from this data. Class members discuss sources of data and then individuals answer questions in the...

Students work together to complete a simulation on drought days. As a class, they discuss their results and compare water usage of the past to current numbers. After reading short excerpts, they answer discussion questions and review as...

Students examine the greenhouse effect, as they determine how moisture in the air affects the diurnal temperature range. Their investigation help them to explain different climatological regimes of both the Southern Great Plains and the...

Through a variety of physical and theoretical situations, learners are led through the development of some of the deepest concepts in high school mathematics. Complex numbers, the fundamental theorem of algebra and rational exponents...

Students brainstorm and discuss the concept of cryptography, the science of secrets in today's world and then focus on a system for sending secret messages used by Julius Caesar. They make a Caesar wheel assessing encrypting and...

Students design a candy container that contains a specific amount of candy. They demonstrate how an engineering problem can be solved with math and that there are multiple answers to the problem. They compute volume of spheres.

Young scholars construct the Metric Pyramid from the handout. They use the Metric Pyramid to convert from standard to metric measure and vice versa. They compute their own Body Mass Index.

Students graph the upwelling and downwelling of shortwave radiation. They create a data table with the information. Students compute the Watts per square meter. They discuss their results and whether or not cloud type affects daily...

Students inspect divisibility rules. In this divisibility rules lesson, students study the relationship between factorization and the divisibility rules for 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, and 10. Students read One Hundred Hungry Ants and A Remainder of...

Students examine the importance of the nutritional value of explorers' meals. They investigate the concepts of caloric intake vs. caloric expenditure and examine their own nutrition.

In this tree-ring dating activity, students use activity sheets to determine a tree's age and to observe changes in climate from the tree-rings. Students investigate how archaeologists use tree rings to date evidence and they answer 5...

Students explain what El Nino is, where it is located and how it is created. They describe the weather changes caused by El Nino. They draw the patterns of El Nino on a world map. They predict economic effects El Nino has on the areas it...