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 ...

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

The Water Cycle

This activity was developed to give participants an understanding of Earth's water cycle by completing a WebQuest and building a model of the water cycle.

Exploring the Water Cycle

In this lesson, students will learn about the water cycle and how energy from the sun and the force of gravity drive this cycle.

Cloudy vs. Clear

Jessica Taylor, Ashwinraj Ravindran
Students analyze and interpret graphs to compare the flow of shortwave energy from the Sun toward China over the course of a year on cloudy versus clear days.

Elementary GLOBE Water Module

Becca Hatheway, Kerry Zarlengo, Lisa Gardiner, Sandra Henderson
Students learn about the water cycle and hydrology through a series of three lessons, two coloring book pages, and an e-Book. The themes covered in this resource tie into Climate Science and ...

Elementary GLOBE Earth Systems Module

Becca Hatheway, Kerry Zarlengo, Lisa Gardiner
Several activities that introduce students to the concepts of earth as a series of systems that are all connected. All of the activities reinforce the idea that water, air, soil, and living things ...