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Taking notes and creating visual summaries

This activity asks students to practice two literacy skills: note-taking and summarizing. Note-taking helps students identify and remember important information, enhancing comprehension as they read. Creating a visual summary encourages students to consolidate and communicate key information.

The home as laboratory

Science isn’t done just in a laboratory. Observing phenomena and collecting data in the real world are key parts of the scientific effort. This activity, designed for at-home learning, encourages students to collect and analyze data in their own homes to develop a research question for future exploration.

Geologist for a day

Rocks found across the world offer clues to geological processes, as well as the history of Earth and the rest of the solar system. In this activity, students will review types of rocks and the rock cycle and will apply that knowledge to interpret data on two rock samples.

Collaborating to stop an epidemic

Students will imagine that they are officers at the World Health Organization and will work in groups to develop action plans to prevent the spread of a new virus, such as coronavirus.

Protective headgear design challenge

Concussions are a common sports injury. After reviewing Newton’s laws of motion, force diagrams, momentum, and elastic and inelastic collisions, students will test various materials that might protect the head from sports collisions and use those materials to design protective headgear.

Cats and Punnett squares

Scientists would like to breed cats that don’t trigger allergies in people. By constructing and analyzing a Punnett square for two low-allergen cats, students will review key concepts including patterns and probabilities of inheritance, genotype, phenotype, genes, alleles, chromosomes and mutations.

Seeing in infrared

In this activity, students will analyze infrared images and then explore how infrared imaging is used across a range of fields of work. Skills include researching, evaluating, synthesizing and presenting information.

A world of acoustics

Students will use decibel meters to understand how the volume of a sound changes as it travels away from a source. Concepts covered include sound waves, the inverse square law, absorption and reflection. The activity also asks students to consider how the characteristics of a space affect the sound.

What’s that smell?

Students will explore how our sense of smell helps us interpret the world around us, and how those interpretations may vary. Students will practice analyzing data and determine how temperature affects vapor pressure and thus the intensity of scents.

Lunar orbit

Students will practice analyzing and graphing data about the moon’s orbit. The activity will help students understand the Earth-moon system and the nature of elliptical orbits.

Stories in rock

In this activity, students will research important fossil sites across the world and synthesize what they find into a story to present to the class.

Unbalancing the carbon cycle

This activity covers where carbon is stored in the Earth, how carbon moves through Earth’s various spheres and how humans are impacting that carbon flow.