Become an amateur meteorologist by building your own weather station and keeping a record of your measurements. Older students can independently follow instructions on how to build five different instruments (barometer, hygrometer, rain gauge, weather vane, and compass). Younger students will need adult supervision with hammer and nails. Full description.

Students participating in this lesson will collect, observe, and record particulates from the air to contrast visible and invisible air pollution. They then complete a simulation of the damage due to acid rain to illustrate invisible pollution. The lesson plan provides essential elements, objective, focus, a list of materials, background information, procedure, and ideas for enrichment. Full description.

In this lesson, students download cloud and surface data from the NASA CERES S-COOL website student observation database, then develop and compare graphs to explore the relationships between surface temperature, pressure, and humidity. Students then investigate possible patterns in cloud-types and the surface conditions for several locations on a particular date of their choice from the S-COOL data. ... Full description.

A learning activity for the Scoop on Soils book in the Elementary GLOBE Series. Each student will explore three activities that promote understanding of and respect for soil. They will generate responses to the following questions: "What makes up soil?" and "What lives in the soil?" Next the students will watch a demonstration of how much soil there is on Earth that is available for human use. Last ... Full description.

This online collaborative project is part of the Center for Improved Engineering and Science Education (CIESE) program, which has developed internet activities for the elementary, middle, and high school level student. Based on data collected by their household members and their classmates, students determine the average amount of water used by one person in a day. They compare this to the average ... Full description.

This activity explores the potential impact of climate variability and change on one of Earth's increasingly vulnerable resources, forests. Although the activity is designed to tap specific skills and knowledge through scientific inquiry, its broader intent is to stimulate thought about the long-term impacts of a warmer planet. The scenario invites students to examine higher level issues of climate ... Full description.

The purpose of this activity is to observe the type and cover of clouds including contrails. Students observe which of ten types of clouds and how many of three types of contrails are visible and how much of the sky is covered by clouds (other than contrails) and how much is covered by contrails. Intended outcomes are that students learn how to make estimates from observations and how to categorize ... Full description.

The purpose of this activity is to record daily measurements of maximum, minimum, and current air and soil temperatures at a common site. One temperature probe is placed inside an instrument shelter while another is installed at a 10 cm depth in the soil. A digital thermometer is used to measure current temperatures as well as daily minimum and maximum temperatures. The daily minimum and maximum temperatures ... Full description.

The purpose of this activity is to measure air (and optionally soil) temperature within one hour of solar noon and the maximum and minimum air temperatures for the previous 24 hours. Intended outcomes are that students will learn to read minimum, maximum, and current temperatures using a U-shaped thermometer, understand diurnal and annual temperature variations, and recognize factors that influence ... Full description.

The purpose of this resource is to measure the pH of water. Students use either a pH meter or pH paper to measure the pH. If using the pH meter, the meter needs to be calibrated with buffer solutions that have pH values of 4, 7, and 10. Full description.