The purpose of this resource is to understand what causes the Earth's seasons with a focus on the Earth's tilt and spherical shape. Students learn how sunlight spreads over the Earth at different times of the year, emphasizing the solstices and the equinoxes. Students investigate the effect of the Earth.s tilt on the spread of sunlight by modeling different tilts using a three-dimensional polyhedron ... Full description.

The purpose of this resource is to further students' understanding of the causes of seasonal change using visualizations to compare the effects of incoming solar energy in the two hemispheres. The class reviews global visualizations of incoming sunlight and surface temperature and discusses seasonal change. Students use the visualizations to support inquiry on the differences in seasonal change in ... Full description.

Discovering Plate Boundaries is based on 5 world maps containing earthquake, volcano, topography, satellite gravity, and seafloor age data. The novel aspect of the exercise is the "jigsaw" manner in which student groups access the maps and use them to discover, classify, and describe plate boundary types. The exercise is based only on observation and description, which makes it useful at a wide variety ... Full description.

This lesson plan is part of the Center for Educational Resources (CERES), a series of web-based astronomy lessons created by a team of master teachers, university faculty, and NASA researchers. In this lesson, students gain a deeper understanding of cosmology by gathering evidence for the Big Bang theory. They explore the Hubble Law and create a model of the expanding universe. This lesson contains ... Full description.

In this lesson, students experience the historical discovery of fossils which increasingly link whales to earlier land-dwelling mammals. This experience also reveals how scientists can make predictions about past events based on the theory that whales evolved from certain groups of early land mammals. Such predictions suggest the age and location of sediments where fossils of early whales would most ... Full description.

This lesson is based on an article that explains what cladistics is, why it is useful, how it is applied, and what its limitations are. Students will learn that biological classification is intimately associated with evolution; that there are many problems encountered in classification, which is evidence that the living world is a work in progress, and evolution provides an explanation for those problems. ... Full description.

This lesson on natural selection shows students that population characteristics can change as a result of selective pressures operating over several generations. In the lesson, groups of students go hunting for beans in the lawn. Each group has a different tool (e.g. hand, spoon, fork, etc). There are three different colors of beans. The hunting goes for three rounds (generations), with extinctions ... Full description.

In this lesson, students will investigate the South Atlantic Bight to discover what it is and how was it formed. As they investigate the Bight, students will sequence and model the events leading to the formation of the southeastern coast of the United States, examine what forces have changed the structure of this area over geologic time, predict what changes are yet to occur and how these changes ... Full description.

In this activity, students will explore how energy is distributed at the surface of the earth in both space and time. Using data sets collected from Black Rock Forest, an instrumented education and research forest near West Point, New York, they will investigate variations in hourly solar energy influx and daily average solar radiation. They will make observations from the data, interpret it, and ... Full description.

The Stefan-Boltzmann Law is a fundamental law of physics. In this lesson, students will use this law and the near-ground air temperature to compute the hourly irradiance emitted by the surface of Earth. Then comparisons will be made with actual observations of this variable, called upwelling terrestrial radiation. Full description.