Web Weather for Kids offers hands-on classroom activities for students to learn about selected severe weather phenomena. Each activity has step-by-step instructions, materials lists, and guiding questions for students. A Teacher Tips page offers implementation strategies for teachers. Phenomena covered include the formation of thunderstorms, lightning, and tornados. Students explore the concepts of ... Full description.

This lesson plan provides instruction to teachers for creating a glacier in the classroom to demonstrate how glaciation affects landforms. Learning objectives include student understanding that as glaciers move, they create a variety of patterns on landforms by a process called glacial scraping, that the scraping patterns left by a glacier depend on how the glacier moved over the landform, and that ... Full description.

The Gulf of Maine Aquarium hosts this two-part activity. The focus is on seasonal changes in the mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Part 1 uses an atlas and satellite imagery to examine the geography of the region and the changing boundaries of the ice sheet. Part 2 tracks annual changes in sea ice. There is an animation page showing changes in ice cover around Antarctica during 1991, and links ... Full description.

The New Millennium Observatory (NeMO) is a seafloor observatory off the coast of Oregon, which studies the relationships between submarine volcanic events and the chemistry and distribution of hydrothermal vents and the biologic communities that depend on them. The research activities at NeMO provide an extraordinary educational opportunity, both from the daily reports from expeditions at sea and ... 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 web site provides a short, interactive, four-question quiz on earthquakes focusing the the largest earthquake in both the world and in recent US history, preparedness, and the development of seismic instrumentation. Full description.

The Historical Hurricane Tracks tool is an interactive mapping application that allows you to easily search and display Atlantic Basin and East-Central Pacific Basin tropical cyclone data. At this web site you can learn about historical tropical cyclones occurring in different areas located throughout the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico. The web site provides information about U.S. coastal ... Full description.

This resource provides an overview of the concept of global warming, which is thought to be due to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, which are largely a result of the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. It explores the possibility that the impacts of global warming may include desertification and the destruction of other ecosystems, extreme weather conditions, and a danger to agriculture. ... Full description.

The Virtual Courseware Project produces interactive online simulations to help enhance the learning and teaching of geology and other Earth and environmental science topics. Each lab provides a brief introduction to the topic and a quiz to assess understanding of the material. Materials include an activity in which seismic waves are used to determine the magnitude of an earthquake and to locate its ... Full description.

This on-line project is part of the Center for Improved Engineering and Science Education (CIESE) program. As they complete this series of lessons, students will use real-time data to solve a problem, study the correlation between earthquakes and tectonic plates, and determine whether or not there is a relationship between volcanoes and plate boundaries. Musical Plates has four Core Activities that ... Full description.