Students explore the concept of interpreting data. In this interpreting data instructional activity, students make a line plot of themselves according to the number of cubes they can hold in their hand. Students create their own data to...

How random is random? Demonstrate the different random sampling methods using a hands-on activity. Pupils use various sampling techniques to choose a random sample of elements from the periodic table. They use the different samples to...

What did gender have to do with the survival rates of the Donner Party? Using comparative box plots, classes compare the ages of the survivors and nonsurvivors. Using the same method, individuals make conclusions about the...

Students explore the concept data sets.  In this data sets instructional activity, students find the 5 number summaries for salaries of teachers and compare them with 5 number summaries of professional baseball players. ...

Conduct an experiment to determine the accuracy of pedometers versus pedometer apps. Class members collect data from each device, analyze the data using a hypothesis test, and determine if there is a significant difference...

Seventh graders write a few sentences explaining the most important events of their lives during the past year. As a class, they discuss why they chose the elements they did for their sentences. To end the lesson, they read a variety of...

In the second lesson of a five-part series, young climatologists use provided temperature and precipitation data to create climographs of three different cities. They then analyze these climographs to develop a general understanding...

Students watch a classroom demonstration, and experiment to discover the five ways that Earth's crust shifts along a fault.

Second graders will track the weather patterns throughout the school year. This project spans the school year and takes five minutes per day or less. Measuring, data collection, and predictions are all explored throughout this relevant...

Physical science juniors will enjoy this sensational enrichment on aerodynamics, especially if they are also sports fans! With a focus on physical features and behaviors, collaborative groups make observations on five different golf...

Introduce literature circles with Roland Smith's novels. Your seventh graders will see the activity modeled as you read The Three Little Pigs together and apply the format to a Roland Smith novel of their choice. The lesson includes...

Travel back to 1787 as young scholars investigate the creation of the US Constitution. After first working in small groups to create sets of classroom rules, students go on to read a summary of the Constitution and watch a short video...

Explore the effect of outliers through an analysis of mean, median, and standard deviation. Your classes examine and compare these measures for two groups. They must make sense of a group that has a higher mean but lower median compared...

What does the sun mean to you? Learners have many different interests that may have connections to the sun. Whether its solar radiation, solar flares, or solar storms, there are connections to daily interests that may surprise your...

What can we learn from the data? Young scholars analyze actual solar data to answer specific questions. The activity presents an opportunity for an open-ended investigation of the data to conclude a five-part series on solar winds.

Bring the sun to your class! Young scholars analyze actual solar wind data in the second lesson of a five-part series. Their analysis includes speed, temperature, and density data.

Battle of the hemispheres? In the fourth installment of a five-part series, young oceanographers use the NOAA website to collect temperature data from drifters (buoys), one in the Northern Hemisphere and one in the Southern Hemisphere....

Young scientists gain a better understanding of space, the solar system and its vastness by creating a scale model. Students first need to calculate the distance between each of the nine planets according to the size of their scale. This...

What information can be gleaned from a box and whiskers plot? Discuss the five summary values - minimum, maximum, upper and lower quartiles, and median - and what conclusions can be made from these values? Included here is a matching...

Ground-truthing ... is it even a word? The last installment of a five-part series analyzes how scientists collect sea surface temperature data. Scholars use government websites to compare temperature data collected directly from buoys...

Be shore to use this drifter resource. The third installment of a five-part series has learners using the NOAA's Adopt-a-Drifter website to track to movement of a drifter (buoy) in the ocean. Graphing the collected data on a map allows...

Invite your first graders to compose and decompose two and three-dimensional figures with this fun, hands-on lesson plan. They investigate and predict the results of putting together and taking apart two-dimensional shapes with rubber...

Assist your high school class with researching and applying the principles of gravity so they may further understand why Einstein is so widely recognized, even today. Individuals compare and contrast two different models that demonstrate...

What a fantastic project idea for discussing not only the history of America's expansion into the West, but for reviewing any major unit of history in your class. Pupils build stamp collections to visually represent themes of the...