This lesson plan develops the concept of irrigation for elementary school level kids. The lesson plan provides two activities involving role playing. Using the role playing activites and labs, elementary students should acquire the critical thinking skills necessary to draw conclusions about various aspects of irrigation. Full description.

This module on measuring temperature and its effects on water quality is from a larger series on water quality investigations. The purpose of the site is to help students recognize that temperature can affect the organisms that live in water, describe the factors that can change the temperature of a body of water, and how to measure, graph, and interpret the effects of temperature on fish. It provides ... Full description.

This lesson plan details an activity designed to put students in the role of scientists in analyzing the geological processes that occur on terrestrial planets - i.e. Earth and Mars. Students will use images from NASA?s Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera onboard the Mars Odyssey spacecraft to evaluate the geologic history and present conditions on Mars. This activity will enable students ... Full description.

Students participating in this lab activity will construct a simulated aquifer in the classroom. The aquifer is constructed from readily available materials, and instructions, data sheets, vocabulary, and diagrams are provided. This simple model is intended for student inquiry into groundwater systems. Students are instructed to try things (within the context of the model), observe what happens, and ... Full description.

This lesson offers students an introduction to river ecology and the effects of human activity on watersheds. They will learn the basics of river ecology; research how dams affect the environment; and study a specific watershed in the United States. Assessment materials, extension activities, and links to related sites are inlcuded. Full description.

Many claims have been made about the evidence for or against global warming, yet whether the interpretation of the data points leans towards fact or fiction, a more descriptive term to use is global climate change. The most hard-hit area where global climate change is apparent is within the Arctic Circle. In this lesson, students will explore data from the Arctic, develop relationships between parameters ... 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.

This resource gives an impression of how immense our Universe is by starting with an image of the Earth and then zooming out to the furthest visible reaches of the Universe. Its goal is to show astronomical distances without scientific notation. Instead, it focuses on the large number of zeros that are in astronomical distances when we measure them with a familiar unit like the kilometer. The number ... Full description.

This lesson is designed to help students gain knowledge in using the MY NASA DATA Live Access Server (LAS) to specify and download a microset of data, then to use the data to compare the ozone levels of selected regions around the world. Students locate and identify geographical regions using latitude and longitude; then, in groups, students create and analyze graphs of ozone levels for the identified ... Full description.

Snow and ice are both precipitation, that is, the processes that remove water from clouds. Clouds, regions of the atmosphere with high relative humidity, are made of droplets of water and perhaps bits of ice. Even though water is much denser than air, these droplets and ice crystals are small enough to be suspended by random upward air motion. When these droplets or crystals join together, gravity ... Full description.