Students use a UV meter to monitor UV over a period of several hours and correlate it to atmospheric conditions. After collecting data, students will create a graph and also compare their data to the day's UV index forecast.
Students demonstrate the importance of reducing direct UV exposure and illustrate the degree of protection provided by various sources of shade.
Students demonstrate the effectiveness of a variety of fabrics on reducing UV.
This board game familiarizes students with air pollution vocabulary and concepts.
Students make a wind streamer for use as a wind vane to discover from which direction the wind is blowing.
Students will relate weather conditions to ground level ozone and air quality conditions.
Students demonstrate the rate at which the sun's energy is absorbed is affected by the color of a material.
In this activity, students are introduced to static equilibrium by learning how forces and torques are balanced in a well-designed engineering structure. A tower crane is presented as a simplified two-dimensional case. Using Popsicle sticks and hot glue, student teams design, build and test a simple tower crane model according to these principles, ending with a team competition.
This brief classroom activity can be used to informally assess students ability to apply the principles of economic reasoning to environmental issues.
Students will use an online calculator to estimate their household's carbon footprint and explore various actions to reduce it.
In this lesson, students explain genetic variation and natural selection and describe how an organism with traits better suited for their environment is more likely to survive.
This resource is a lesson plan in which students will use clues from bird beaks and feet to design a bird. They will then write about the environment of that bird and how its structures enable it to survive.
In this lesson, students will create an animal that is camouflaged for a certain area of the classroom.
Students watch a video of a gliding lizard to examine characteristics that enable flight. They record in chart form characteristics and abilities of four pterosaurs to see how these animals adapted to survive over millions of years.
This lesson outlines teacher-led discussion on the topic of migration as an adaptive behavior in response to changes in the animal's environment. Journaling questions are also provided to help build each student's individual understanding.
Students investigate conditions in the deepest parts of the ocean, make inferences about ocean creatures based on their physical characteristics, and design creatures that could survive in the Mariana Trench.
This webpage provides graphics illustrating adaptive structures and adaptive behaviors of unicellular organisms.
This resource is a lesson plan in which a balloon covered flask with water is heated. Changes are recorded. There will be changes in the states of matter and a volume change while the total mass stays the same.
In this activity, students construct adding slide rules, scaled with linear calibrations like ordinary rulers. Students learn to move these scales relative to each other in ways that add and subtract distances, thus calculating sums and differences. This is Activity A1 in the "Far Out Math" educator's guide. Lessons within the guide include activities in which students measure, compare quantities as orders of magnitude, use scientific notation, and develop an understanding of exponents and logarithms using examples from NASA's GLAST mission. These are skills needed to understand the very large and very small quantities characteristic of astronomical observations. Note: In 2008, the GLAST mission was renamed Fermi, for the physicist Enrico Fermi.
As emissions of heat-trapping bases accumulate in our atmosphere, Earth's polar regions are warming more quickly than at lower latitudes. The rapid environmental changes that result from this warming can have a significant impact on the physical and mental health of rural Alaskans: unpredictable weather and changes in the seasons have made harvesting food more difficult, hazardous, and stressful. The risk of physical injury has also increased, as poor ice, extreme weather, and coastal erosion bring new travel hazards. Increasingly difficult harvest conditions for fish, shellfish, berries, caribou, and sea mammals have also increased concerns about food security. Additionally, declines in snow pack, the threat of drought, changes in lake and river conditions, and damage and disruptions to community water systems have prompted concerns of water security. The climate-related challenge faced by Alaskas tribal health system is to recognize new health stressors and community vulnerabilities, and then find healthy adaptation strategies in an increasingly uncertain future.