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Journal Article
Are plastic water bottles safe to drink from and reuse repeatedly?...
Journal Article
Career of the Month: An Interview With Scientific Photographer Flip Nicklin
Scientific photographers use special photo imaging techniques to record experiments, illustrate information, and capture both the hidden and visible world around us. This Career of the Month column features an interview with underwater photographer F...
Journal Article
Scope on Safety: A Science Lab by Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet—But Would It Be as Safe?
This column focuses on safety information for your classroom. In this month’s column the author discusses the definition of laboratory....
Journal Article
Fire and Ecological Disturbance
Misconceptions are not simply factual errors or a lack of understanding, but rather explanations that are constructed based on past experiences (Hewson and Hewson 1988). If students' misconceptions are not directly engaged in the learning process, th...
Journal Article
Science 2.0: Stop-Motion Mitosis
In this month's Science 2.0 column, Eric Brunsell and Martin Horejsi share an interview with Kathy Cady, a biology teacher in Winneconne, Wisconsin, who uses stop-still animation to engage her students. Stop-still, or stop-motion, animations feature ...
Book Chapter
Ballpark Pretzels: Using Microscopes to Observe Yeast Fermentation of Sugar
The experiment in this free chapter provides a hands-on lab experience for students to being their investigation into yeast and the fermentation of sugars. The experiment allows students to view the yeast under the microscope, gaining skills in using...
Book Chapter
Osmosis and "Naked" Eggs: The Environment Matters
Osmosis is the diffusion of water through a selectively permeable membrane. Given their size and availability, the hard exterior shell of eggs provide a convenient macro-scale model of the system-level phenomenon of osmosis. Once the shell of a fres...
Book Chapter
Edible Plate Tectonics: Plates Move and Interact
Plate tectonics is geology’s central theory and one of the most important in science. It provides explanations for many of Earth’s major geological processes and physical features. This Activity uses an unusual physical model to introduce some of...
Book Chapter
Convection: Transfer of Heat From Earth’s Interior
In this activity, students conduct experimental trials involving a drop of food coloring moved by convection in a pan of water to observe convection cells. Students record their observations on this model and relate what is observed in the pan to wha...
Book Chapter
A Voyage Through Time: Pangaea Breakup and Continent/Plate Movement
In this activity, students will follow the movement of continents over the past 200 million years, beginning with the breakup of Pangaea. Students analyze the consequences of plate tectonics on continents by modeling the breakup of Pangaea via a flip...
Book Chapter
Magma and Volcanoes: Model of a Volcano
Students, in this activity, model a volcanic eruption by melting crayons inside a plaster of paris model. They use a hot water bath to melt the wax, which rises through a tube they made with string in the plaster of paris...
Book Chapter
Shake It Up: Earthquakes and Damage to Buildings
Nearly all locations on Earth experience occasional earthquakes, although most of them are not large enough to cause significant damage. In this activity, students will use sugar cubes to investigate and compare the effects of an earthquake on differ...
Book Chapter
Study Your Sandwich: Sedimentary Rock Layers, Structures, and Relative Ages
In this activity, students make a triple-decker, soy butter with raisins and jelly sandwich to model sedimentary rock formations. They take core samples with a straw, fold the sandwich into synclines and anticlines, and cut it to simulate faulting. F...
Book Chapter
GeoPatterns: Global Earthquake Distribution
Do earthquakes occur randomly, or are there patterns to their distribution? Does where earthquakes occur shed light on why they occur? What causes earthquakes? What determines where an earthquake will occur? In this Activity, students will look for p...
Book Chapter
The Reading on Plate Tectonics elaborates on the concepts presented in the Activities section of Project Earth Science: Geology, Revised 2nd Edition. This Reading was written especially for this volume with the teacher in mind. The outer part of ...
Book Chapter
Volcanoes and Plates: Volcanic Activity and Plate Boundaries
In this activity, students compare locations of volcanoes to the types of rocks erupted and tie this in to the motions of lithospheric plates. They will map rocks by their main chemical components. Students then discern plate boundaries from their ma...
Book Chapter
The Reading on Volcanoes elaborates on the concepts presented in the Activities section of Project Earth Science: Geology, Revised 2nd Edition. This Reading was written especially for this volume with the teacher in mind. Volcanic activity occu...
Book Chapter
Volcanoes and Hot Spots: Formation of Hawaiian Islands
Students, in this activity, relate plate movement to trails of volcanoes by modeling a hot spot with hot colored water rising under a floating Styrofoam plate. Questions guide students to connecting their model to Hawaiian volcanoes and the Emperor S...
Book Chapter
The Reading on Earthquakes elaborates on the concepts presented in the Activities section of Project Earth Science: Geology, Revised 2nd Edition. This Reading was written especially for this volume with the teacher in mind. Most earthquakes occ...
Book Chapter
All Cracked Up: Model of Earth’s Layers
In this Activity, students will learn more about the structure or layering of Earth. Students analyze a hard-boiled egg as a model for Earth’s interior structure. They then scrutinize and evaluate other objects as models for Earth. ...
Book Chapter
The Reading on Rocks and Minerals elaborates on the concepts presented in the Activities section of Project Earth Science: Geology, Revised 2nd Edition. This Reading was written especially for this volume with the teacher in mind. Typical rocks...
Book Chapter
Seafloor Spreading: Divergent Plate Boundaries
Students, in this activity, will make and use a paper model to understand seafloor spreading. By doing so, they explore patterns of rock ages and rock magnetism parallel to mid-ocean ridges. ...
Book Chapter
Careers in Geology and Geosciences
The Reading on Careers in Geology and Geosciences provides a resource for teachers to help students know what geologists do and how to become one. The Readings were written especially for Project Earth Science: Geology, Revised 2nd Edition. with ...
Book Chapter
In this activity, students will experiment with the old but still useful technique of using sounding lines to make seafloor maps. As is done often in science and in other fields, students will work in teams. They should observe that the number of mea...
Book Chapter
Rocks Tell a Story: Rock Characteristics and Environmental Clues
Identifying rocks can be difficult, even for geologists. Proper rock identification depends on the quality of the specimen and on the clarity of its significant characteristics. In this activity, students observe and compare pairs of related rocks an...
Book Chapter
The Rock Cycle: Rock Formation and Change
A single rock could provide an example of how slowly most geological changes occur on Earth. If you picked up a rock and kept it for the rest of your life, you would probably notice that it changes little, if at all. Yet, rocks can and do change; it ...
Book Chapter
Students, in this activity, use a globe and lamp to model Earth’s orbit. From this concrete model, they see and understand that the cause of Earth’s seasons is the tilt of its rotational axis....
Book Chapter
The greenhouse effect refers to the way Earth’s atmospheric gases create a barrier that allows the heat from the Sun to penetrate and be absorbed by Earth’s surface. The heat is trapped, much like in a greenhouse. The greenhouse effect on Venus w...
Book Chapter
Every 29.5 days, the Moon’s shape appears to change in a predictable cycle. We call the shapes phases of the Moon. This activity will show how the Moon’s orbit causes the Moon’s phases. Students use Ping-Pong or Styrofoam balls to model the way...
Book Chapter
Students, in this activity, measure distances by walking heel-to-toe in the unit “student minute.” This is to gain an intuitive under¬standing of light years, a unit in which time represents distance....
Book Chapter
Much has been written about global warming and climate change, but Dr. Claire Parkinson, a NASA climatologist, cautions about the more alarmist predictions of future crises. Global warming is a fact, but how we go about dealing with it is still open ...
Book Chapter
Measuring diameters of objects in the solar system is difficult due to their vast distances and huge sizes. If the distance to an object is known, we can use a method of indirect measurement in which we measure the angular diameter, and then apply a ...
Book Chapter
The cause for the changing appearance of the Moon—its phases—is a difficult concept for many people to learn, and this gives rise to some surprisingly stubborn preconceptions. The phases are caused by the fact that we can only see the part of the...
Book Chapter
Sizes and distances in the solar system are difficult to visualize. In this activity, students calculate scaled distances and planetary diameters to planets in our solar system. They then make a model in a large open space, using their scaled measure...
Book Chapter
For the past 400 years, astronomers have explored the universe with telescopes. Telescopes gather light from distant objects and funnel the light into our eyes, or into a camera. But, Earth’s atmosphere absorbs some of the light coming from those d...
Book Chapter
This activity is designed to help students understand that light does have a finite speed and that this has consequences for us. In order to grasp the meaning of the activity, it is important for students to understand that light acts as a messenger ...
Book Chapter
Measuring parallax and angular diameters are two indirect methods of measuring size and distance in the solar system. The scale model is another indirect method of measurement that also allows us to explore the relationships between multiple componen...
Book Chapter
The Goldilocks Effect: Earth Is Just Right
Complex life forms require certain conditions to thrive. The distance from a star at which an Earth-like planet could sustain life is known as the habitable zone—not too close, not too far, but just right. This Reading provides background infor...
Book Chapter
The Formation of the Solar System
Over the last four centuries, people have developed many theories to explain the origin and evolution of the solar system. Today, the theory most commonly held by scientists is known as the solar nebula theory. In this activity, students create, obse...
Book Chapter
The stars are too far away to measure their distance directly, so astronomers use an indirect method that involves looking at the star from two or more perspectives. They measure how much the foreground star’s position changes among the background ...