This activity introduces students to the ecosystem processes and interactions among populations, communities, and their environments. It will help students connect the flow of matter and energy through observations, lab work, and group field studies. Studying plant and animal life will directly focus on predator/prey, parasite/host, and producer/consumer/decomposer relationships.

In this lesson, students analyze energy use, cost, and source patterns from household to regional scales and relate these patterns to CO2 emissions.

In this lesson, students identify plant parts, where seeds come from and how they grow. They will also determine what plants need to survive.

In this activity, students are asked to assess the effectiveness, fairness, and political appeal of two plans to reduce oil imports: increasing CAFE standards or a gasoline tax.

In this lesson, students visualize earthquake, volcano, topographic data, geologic maps, and photogrpahs of geologic structures to identify similarities and differences between the Newark Rift Basin and East African Rift using interactive powerpoint presentations and GeoMapApp.

In this activity, students predict and understand the relationship between position, velocity and acceleration graphs and describe the motion of any object given one motion graph.

In this lesson, students investigate different growth mediums for a lima bean seed. Students will ggrow a ima bean in a moist paper towel and grow a second lima bean in a paper cup with soil. The student will then document the growth by journaling it in a booklet one time a week, recognizing the stages of growth and idenitifying the key components necessary for growth - water, sunlight, and food.

In this role-playing activity, students take on the roles of members of a forest ecosystem to illustrate the challenges facing endangered species, environmental stewards and economic interests.

In this lesson, students examine soil and determine which soil will be the best for plant growth. The students will also investigate the effect of sunlight on plants and the importance of sunlight in producing chlorophyll.

In this activity, students isolate the factors that determine the period of a pendulum. The students test hypotheses and also do a data match to see if their experimental results come close to the mathematical results.

In this activity, students will interpret how biological indicators are used to gauge the health of a stream and practice calculating the biotic index of a simulated stream site in order to analyze the water quality.

After students have learned the basic relationship of Snell's Law, they practice applying it to a situation. Then they are given another situation where it "doesn't work." This situation turns out to be one in which total internal reflection occurs. Students are then shown what happens with classroom apparatus.

In this lab activity, students will use data from real corals collected in Sumatra to track the sea-level and earthquake record of the region over the past century. The Sumatra region is prone to earthquakes because it lies at the boundary of two of Earth's shifting tectonic plates—the Indian Ocean crust is creeping steadily northeast and subducting beneath Sumatra. The steady horizontal movements, and pulses of faster horizontal motion that occur during earthquakes, are recorded by GPS stations on the islands. But GPS has only been around since the 1980s, so it can't tell us about land motions associated with large earthquakes that happened in Sumatra long ago. GPS also lacks precise information on vertical motions, and cannot be installed under water, so GPS measurements of coastal land movements are incomplete. In order to figure out how often large earthquakes happen in the Sumatra region, scientists have turned to coral micro-atolls. They also use coral records to reconstruct progressive sea level changes.

In this lab investigation, students will explore how climate variability on both short- and long-term timescales affects fisheries.

In this lesson, students will investigate motion and speed of toy cars. Observations and predictions of various variables (type, size of toy) will be made with other student groups. Critical thinking will be applied while discussing the reliability of the investigation. Speed, constant speed, average speed, and acceleration will be investigated and recorded using data graphs.

This activity provides the students with a data set of ages of some of the Hawaiian Volcanoes and seamounts and how far they are from the active volcanism (considered to be the location of the hotspot). By plotting the data on a graph and fitting the data with a line of best fit, the plate velocity can be estimated by taking the slope of the line. This lesson defines hotspot volcanoes and the major contributors to the theory. It also discusses the importance of the hotspot theory and how hotspot island and seamount chains can be used to determine plate motions through geological time.

In this lab activity, students will investigate limiting reagents and balanced chemical equations. They will add a fixed amount of baking soda and varying amounts of vinegar to several balloons and observe the resulting reactions.

In this lab activity, students will investigate the movement of different materials across the cell membrane of a raw egg once the egg shell has been dissolved in vinegar. Students will develop an independent investigation in which they will choose a liquid that will re-hydrate the egg that has been dehydrated.

In this lesson, students will observe and chart similarities and differences in samples of rocks and soil.

In this module students will be provided with data regarding the depth of subduction zone earthquakes (from the approximate top of the slab) and surface volcano locations for Central America, they will then plot this data on a map and develop a hypothesis regarding their relationship. As part of this exercise students will create a cross-section of some of the earthquakes, and determine the dip of the slab. The students will then be asked to look at a map of subduction zone earthquake depths for another location and predict where they would expect the volcanoes to be located. They will compare their results with the location of the actual volcanoes in the region. The students will then create a cross-section of the new subduction zone (Tonga) and determine the slab dip for that location. Finally, students will develop a hypothesis regarding slab dip and the distance volcanoes are from the trench (marked on both the Central America and Tonga maps) and test that hypothesis on the Cascadia subduction zone.