Engage middle school students in a meaningful study of the lives of students from across the globe through the use of contemporary nonfiction and fiction. Students create personal autobiographies, sequence story events, and prepare well-crafted summaries while learning to use higher-level comprehension strategies such as Question-Answer Relationships and the Bio-Cube. Additionally, students conduct a critical study of the NCSS Notable Tradebook Nasreen̍s Secret School: A True Story From Afghanistan by Jeanette Winter, comparing and contrasting their own lives to Nasreen̍s and expanding their geographical knowledge of the Middle East.

Students produce a set of eight personal travel 'insights' from field trips within their bioregion. Each insight consists of an image produced by the student and accompanying text; students are producers of meaning rather than consumers.

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This assignment exposes students to racial inequalities in their own communities and helps them to identify the impact of racial segregation on quality of life. The big ideas in this assignment are racial inequality, residential segregation, and environmental justice.

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This resource was customized to include local images that are more representativesDescribe different sociological models for understanding global stratificationUnderstand how studies of global stratification identify worldwide inequalities

Students will need to learn about urban heat islands before they will have all of the information necessary to complete this lab. Instructors may wish to accomplish this via lecture and/or assigned readings and discussion. You may wish to start with the following: Yow, D.M. 2007, "Urban Heat Islands: Observations, Impacts, and Adaptation," Geography Compass. Volume 2, October 2007, 1227-1251.

Also, if your students have no prior experience with MS excel, guiding them through a quick tutorial is advisable.

The first thing students will do in the exercise is report on some important causes of the UHI. Then, they will examine two real-world sites via photographs and Google Earth to discuss how each location's land use/land cover may affect local temperatures. Next, students will analyze data acquired at each site using MS excel. After that, students will be asked to think about potential impacts of the UHI. The exercise ends with a critical thinking exercise asking students to devise and evaluate strategies to communicate scientific knowledge to non-science professionals.

Has minimal/no quantitative component. Uses geophysics to solve problems in other fields.

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Students will participate in an online scavenger hunt based on a story that a geographer named Gina, who loves to travel, has escaped to an undisclosed location. It is their mission to bring her back to the school. Students must follow a series of clues about the location including landmarks, weather, and population—and use a U.S. Census Bureau data tool called State Facts for Students to answer questions that lead them one step closer to finding Gina.

This worksheet provides a pair of satellite world maps, showing vegetation in January and July, and has a series of questions guiding exploration of the similarities and differences in the two images. The activity is from Space Update, a collection of multimedia educational resources about the Earth and Space. Summary background information, data and images supporting the activity are available on the Earth Update data site.

In this activity, students investigate the interacting parts of the Earth system by observing changes in evaporation rate in four small aquariums with different initial conditions. The demonstration requires 4 small aquariums, soil, plants, water, graduated cylinder, scale, plastic wrap, and colored pencils. A student data sheet is included. The resource is supported by teacher background information, assessment suggestions, and a scoring rubric. This is Activity 3 in the learning module, Global Balance, part of the lesson series, The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change.

This video segment adapted from Northwest Indian College reveals how Native American life and knowledge is connected to natural cycles.

The purpose of this resource is to investigate the center pixel of a homogeneous land Cover Site in order to understand that individual land areas are part of a larger land system.

The purpose of this resource is to investigate the idea that every dynamic system has energy and matter in different forms.

Students use spreadsheets to analyze the reasons why New Orleans has subsided in the past 250 years.

In this video adapted from Earth Island Institute, meet a high school student who educated her community about how a coal-burning power plant was contributing to asthma and other health problems there.

In this problem-based learning activity, students are asked to research and make recommendations that balance the benefits of a healthy forest with the economic needs of the people who log it. Students use NIH Image software to analyze satellite imagery from Landsat. This activity is from Exploring the Environment.

This is the final project/presentation for undergraduate students in a relatively small introductory geoscience class where most (but not all) students are taking the class to satisfy their lab science requirement. Students are asked to create their own geological teaching demonstration and/or activity geared to high school or college geoscience classes which allows students to deepen their knowledge in a particular area of their interest. The style of the assignment is similar to the labs in the course where the students participation is "requested" in a (fictional) letter of request and they must respond appropriately with a letter of reply as well as completion of the specific assignment (which, in this case, includes the activity/demonstration, Teacher's Notes, Supply List, Geological Background, and Peer Evaluations). In addition to creating this demonstration/activity and write-up, the students much also trial and present their demonstration/activity to the rest of the class, the instructor, and a visiting K-12 environmental scientist in a conference-style session (name-tags and program provided) for evaluation.

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Students participate in a JiTT activity to read the front pages of two target language newspapers and to report the content to their classmates in the target language. When this exercise is done on a regular basis, it can result in increasing vocabulary and speech fluency.

The Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, is the centerpiece of our nation's story. It looms large, not merely because of its brutality and scope but because of its place in the course of American history. The seeds of war were planted long before 1861 and the conflict remains part of our national memory. Geography has helped shape this narrative. The physical landscape influenced economic differences between the regions, the desire to expand into new territories, the execution of the conflict both in the field and on the home front, and the ways in which our recollections have been shaped. Maps enable us to present the complex strands that, when woven together, provide a detailed account of the causes and conduct of the war. These visual images remain a salient aspect of our memory. Photographs, prints, diaries, songs and letters enhance our ability to tell this story, when our nation, as a Currier & Ives cartoon depicts, was about to be "Torn in Two." This exhibition tells the story of the American Civil War both nationally and locally in Boston, Massachusetts, through maps, documents, letters, and other primary sources. This exhibition was developed by the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, a nonprofit organization established as a partnership between the Boston Public Library and philanthropist Norman Leventhal.

In this problem-based learning activity, students will examine opposing views on the Amazon Rainforest and will take a position on land-use and species conservation in one of the last areas of biodiversity on Earth. This activity is part of Exploring the Environment.

In this unit, students will be introduced to different data types used in the geosciences and other disciplines to understand environmental problems. The instructor will discuss the difference between qualitative and quantitative. Then, students will be given data sets related to water in Phoenix, Arizona. Students will work in groups of two to five to categorize different data sets as qualitative or quantitative and to reflect on their emotive responses to different data. The session ends with a discussion about the potential uses of these various data sets in decision-making around water in Phoenix, and uses this to foster a discussion about the ways in which different data sources lend insight into complex system problems.

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