Lesson 2: My Water Footprint (Middle School)
Kai Olson-Sawyer, GRACE Communications Foundation
This lesson centers on a deeper exploration of the water footprint associated with food. Students learned in Lesson 1 that virtual water, especially as it relates to food, typically makes up the majority of their ...

Lesson 3: The Value of a Water Footprint (Middle School)
Kai Olson-Sawyer, GRACE Communications Foundation
Session 1 of this lesson begins with a quick activity to get students thinking about their direct and virtual water use. It introduces a few new ideas for virtual water use that may surprise students, including the ...

Fault Models for Teaching About Plate Tectonics
Modified from an activity by Larry Braile (Purdue University) by TOTLE (Teachers on the Leading Edge) Project and further improved by ShakeAlert.
This short interactive activity has learners to manipulate fault blocks to better understand different types of earthquake-generating faults in different tectonic settings--extensional, convergent, and strike-slip. Fault models aid in visualizing and understanding faulting and plate motions because the instructor and their students can manipulate a three-dimensional model for a true hands-on experience.

Earthquake Intensity
Jennifer Pickering
Introductory lesson that compares ShakeMaps between earthquakes in the same location but different magnitudes, and earthquakes of the same magnitude but different depths, to acquaint learners to the fundamental controls on intensity of shaking felt during an event: magnitude and distance from the earthquake source.

Rocks are Elastic!! Seeing is Believing
IRIS (Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology)
This activity helps learners see the elastic properties of rocks by actually bending marble. How rocks respond to stress is a fundamental concept, critical to forming explanatory models in the geosciences (e.g., elastic rebound theory). Whereas learners are likely to have lots of experience with rocks, few will have directly experienced them behaving elastically. As a result of this "missed experience", most learners conceptualize rocks as rigid solids; a concept which generally serves students well in everyday life but impedes learning about particular geologic concepts.

Microplastics and marine environment
Giulia Realdon, University of Camerino, Italy
Marine micro-plastics are a relatively recent issue in research (Thompson et al. 2004), in the media and in education and, due to novelty and relevance, they are a suitable topic for addressing Ocean Literacy ...

Rising Tides: Protect Your Home from the Waves

Kate Carter
Warming oceans and melting landlocked ice caused by global climate change may result in rising sea levels. This rise in sea level combined with increased intensity and frequency of storms will ...

Mapping a Personal Story of Environmental Change

Arctic and Earth SIGNs
This is a very simple but effective lesson that engages students with drawing a map of their local environment, then annotating their map with environmental changes they've observed. The ...

Catching a Heat Wave

Lunar and Planetary Institute
Students model the effect of greenhouse gases on Earth's atmosphere. They find that greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, are uniquely shaped to catch and pass on infrared ...

Recipe for a Region

Lunar and Planetary Institute
Students consider the ways their climate affects their region, by identifying a type of food unique to the region and selecting (and possibly cooking) a recipe that features that ingredient. Optional ...