This site describes snow crystals and snowflakes. Although a common meteorological phenomenon, snow crystal growth is a fascinating and poorly understood process, in which remarkably complex and beautifully symmetric structures appear, quite literally, out of thin air. The many facets of snow crystals are described here, along with the attempts to understand their formation. Site highlights include ... 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.

This site allows teachers to use data from ocean drifting buoys to integrate ocean science into their classroom science and math instruction. It offers educational activities and curriculum materials developed and tested by teachers. Lesson plans on currents, moving water, building and tracking drifters are also available. Alternatively, educators may opt to use only the data, background information ... Full description.

In this activity, students gain an understanding of relative and numerical time by placing events in sequence and assigning relative times to the events. This will familarize them with the methods used by scientists to develop the geologic time scale. This activity contains objectives, materials, procedure, and extensions. Full description.

In this lesson, each student team has an envelope containing a series of bank checks. A few are removed at a time, and the team attempts to construct a plausible scenario which involves those checks. With each subsequent removal of checks, appropriate revision of the scenario is done. Final scenarios are compared by the class. Class discussion is designed to show how human values and biases influence ... Full description.

This activity uses the concept of natural selection to introduce the idea of formulating and testing scientific hypotheses. Through a focused discussion approach, the teacher provides information and allows students time to think, interact with peers, and propose explanations for observations described by the teacher. While working on this activity, students will be able to: identify questions that ... Full description.

This activity has students practice working together as a group to build a structure involving a textbook, a styrofoam cup, and a pencil. The rules of this task create a unique challenge for students. The builders are wearing blindfolds and the helpers, who are the only students who have seen the desired structure, cannot speak or handle the building materials. Consequently, the builders and helpers ... Full description.

This online glossary, from the book, Earth: Inside and Out, contains nearly 300 definitions for terms pertaining to a variety of Earth Science topics. Full description.

This site allows students to examine images of galaxies and learn to recognize the various shapes used in the Hubble classification system. The Hubble Tuning Fork Diagram is presented as a way to classify the various types of galaxies observed in space. Students will examine pictures of galaxies and discover that these pictures have been arranged according to a scheme or plan laid out by Edwin Hubble, ... Full description.

In this activity, students classify cookies as if they were classifying rocks. They work in groups to assign at least ten different kinds of cookies to either igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic groups. The students have to justify their decisions based on the physical characteristics of the cookies. Full description.