In this activity, students use models to investigate the process and consequences of water contamination on the land, groundwater, and plants. This is a good introduction to building water filters found in the associated activity, The Dirty Water Project.

The words compose and decompose are used to describe actions that young students learn as they acquire knowledge of small numbers by putting them together and taking them apart. This understanding is a bridge between counting and knowing number combinations. It is how instant recognition of small numbers develops and leads naturally to later understanding of fact families. This task helps them develop an understanding of number combinations.

Students are asked to analyze the data in a graph and determine if there is an association between the two variables.

This article provides links to interactive web sites and lesson plans for teaching about paleontology, dinosaurs, and archaeology in the elementary classroom.

This activity is a daily lab where two students read a thermometer and identify the cloud type for a week. They record it on the board first and we all record it in our journals. A graph of the entire year is also completed and we can analyze the data as we go. We get two new "scientists" each week and we do it all year. I start the first week of school.

After predicting which of two earnings streams has the highest currrent value, students use a discounted values table to compare the two earnings streams, discovering that earlier earnings has higher value and that the choice of earnings streams depends on the interest rate chosen.

In this open-ended design activity, students use everyday materials milk cartons, water bottles, pencils, straws, candy to build small-scale transportation devices. They incorporate the use two simple machines a wheel and axle, and a lever into their designs. Student pairs choose their materials and engineer solutions suitable to convey pyramid-building materials (small blocks of clay). They race their carts/trucks, measuring distance, time and weight; and then calculate speed.

The triangle congruence criteria, SSS, SAS, ASA, all require three pieces of information. It is interesting, however, that not all three pieces of information about sides and angles are sufficient to determine a triangle up to congruence. In this problem, we considered SSA. Also insufficient is AAA, which determines a triangle up to similarity. Unlike SSA, AAS is sufficient because two pairs of congruent angles force the third pair of angles to also be congruent.

Through an adult-led field trip, students organized into investigation teams catalogue the incidence of plastic debris in different environments. They investigate these plastics according to their type, age, location and other characteristics that might indicate what potential they have for becoming part of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP). Students collect qualitative and quantitative data that may be used to create a Google Earth layer as part of a separate activity that can be completed at a computer lab at school or as homework. The activity is designed as a step on the way to student's creation of their own GIS Google Earth layer. It is, however, possible for the field trip to be a useful learning experience unto itself that does not require this last GIS step.

This exercise uses the Think-Pair-Share technique to initiate the problem-solving process. It focuses on a common first step in economic problem solving: identifying relevant and irrelevant information.

The best way for students to understand how groundwater flows is to actually see it. In this activity, students will learn the vocabulary associated with groundwater and see a demonstration of groundwater flow. Students will learn about the measurements that environmental engineers need when creating a groundwater model of a chemical plume.

Students learn how to take bearings using orienteering compasses. They also learn how to describe a bearing and find an object in the classroom using a bearing.

This activity is a water study investigation showing how biotic and abiotic factors are influenced by human activity.

Two formulas and a scenario for students to apply two retail gravitation models used to predict where shoppers will choose to shop.

This task addresses knowledge related to interpreting forms of functions derived by factoring or completing the square. It requires students to pay special attention to the information provided by the way the equation is represented as well as the sign of the leading coefficient, which is not written out explicitly, and then to connect this information to the important features of the graph.

The purpose of this task is for students to explain how they know one quantity is greater or less than another quantity. Students will easily be able to identify which number is greater or less. However, explaining their reasoning will help them solidify their number sense skills.

In this task students see different ways of partitioning a circle and a rectangle into two or more equal shares.

Students compare budget deficits and surpluses generated between 1969 and 2008 measured in nominal terms and then as a percentage of GDP.