This lesson will help students to become familiar with public lands in the United States. Students will consider clues about the scenic, biological, and historical treasures of some of our public lands and use the clues to help identify and locate them on a map. After completing these activities students should be able to articulate the difference between public land and private land, name reasons ... Full description.

In this Internet-based collaborative project, students will investigate their local schoolyard environment and share information about the plants, animals and non-living objects found there with other students from around the country and the world. Participants will look for similarities and differences in the reported data and prepare a final report or presentation based on their findings. The site ... Full description.

This interactive site allows students to learn about wetlands while conducting several activities on the computer. These include two games: Croaker concentration, in which the sounds of frogs are matched, and Secrets of the marsh, which allows students to construct a marsh food chain. Another activity allows students to watch what happens to the wetland as the seasons change. The topics of a section ... Full description.

This interactive site allows the student to discover information contained in the rainforest exhibit of the Ontario Science Center. The first activity gives students the opportunity to search the forest and learn about the highlighted rainforest biota. Another activity is a rainforest quiz that allows students to test their knowledge of rainforests as the acres of rainforest being destroyed is counted ... Full description.

This article reports on the search for microscopic organisms on Earth and Mars. It discusses the work of Chris McKay, an astrobiologist with NASA, what we know from previous missions to Mars, the planetary similarities between Earth and Mars, and current research in the valleys of Antarctica, including the discovery of 3.5-million-year-old bacteria. The article explains how the work of McKay helps ... Full description.

This site has a list of references that cover a wide range of information about the sea floor. From the discovery of the Titanic to the undersea riches of black smokers, the list includes a number of magazine articles that have taken a close look at deep sea vents. The list contains articles in publications that range from Boys Life to Science World. The magazine articles look at: the challenges of ... Full description.

At this site, students learn that sound moves five times faster in water than in air and cleaner fish have cleaning stations where they remove parasites. Students deepen their knowledge with this ocean life challenge. They learn about how living in the water differs from living on land. An ichthyologist first explains that ocean creatures have special features that allow them to breathe, eat, communicate, ... Full description.

This hands-on activity simulates the process of population fluctuation. Students will learn the terms limiting factors and carrying capacity. Rather than memorize these terms, the students can see the terms come to life in this animated penguin activity. The results clearly show how populations are affected by many things -- one of them being food availability. This particular activity focuses on ... Full description.

This activity will help students understand food chains and food webs in the ocean. After studying the materials provided, students will play a food web game, in which they are given a blank food web and the names of the organisms. Students place the organisms in their correct places on the food web so that the arrows indicate the direction of energy flow. As a follow-up, students decide what would ... Full description.

In this activity students will simulate aspects of the Antarctic ice ecosystem, and see how simple life forms respond, thus modeling links between environmental factors and biological responses. Students should recognize the parallels between their work and that done by the Palmer Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) team. Students will conduct a controlled experiment with brine shrimp eggs in order ... Full description.