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Dinosaur Prints
Students examine dinosaur footprints and compare them to the shape of elephant footprints and to the size of their own footprints.
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What Big Teeth You Have:
Young scholars make their own tooth impressions of a sharp and a flat tooth and compare the differences. They make impression of fossil teeth from dinosaurs comparing the sharp and flat teeth and learning about their uses.
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Footprint Detectives: Making Inferences Using Dinosaur Trackways
Students analyze and discuss footprints and dinosaur tracks. They listen to books about paleontologists, create and analyze their own trackways using black paper and chalk, examine the data, and form hypotheses about footprints and...
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Hide and Seek with Bones: A Mapping and Scaling Comparison
Students examine and simulate how paleontologists map objects. They hide and find objects using a grid to map the objects' placements.
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Designasaurus: Modeling Activity for a Paleoartist
Students create and draw fictional dinosaurs. They write a description of their dinosaur.
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A Lab Demonstration: Three dimensional view of soft internal structures of bony material
Students discuss the structures of a bone and observe a demonstration of bony materials.
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A Phylogenetic Perspective for the Cladistically Challenged
Students use M&Ms to simulate radioactive decay of elements.
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Creating a Leaf Collection and Classroom Herbarium
Students categorize leaves they collect from trees outdoors by consulting a variety of sources. They discuss how the form of a leaf reflects its adaptation to its environment.
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Plan a Schedule
In this daily schedule worksheet, students analyze a chart that shows a schedule for events at a museum. Students plan a visit by making a schedule of events they would like in their own schedule.
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Exploring Rocks
Students collect and examine rocks. They record information about the rocks they have collected in their notebooks. They compare and contrast different rocks and complete a class chart at the end of the lesson.
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Dig It Up
Learners participate in an archaeological excavation to determine how archeologists make inferences about various cultures. They reconstruct the site using layers of drawings. They discuss the kinds of information they learned.
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Discussion of Adaptation
Students discuss ways in which dinosaurs adapted to their environments. They apply the same logic to an analysis of human habitat, survival needs, and survival need fulfillment to explain how people have adapted to their environment.
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Environmental Hazards
Students identify environmental hazards on a simulated field trip. They analyze the exposure and suggest methods to eliminate or reduce exposure to toxic sources.
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Exploring Minerals
Students examine the differences between rocks and minerals. They discover the properties of different minerals and perform hardness tests on minerals. They collect their data and make observations.
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Rocks, Rocks & More Rocks
Second graders work together to examine different types of rocks. They sort rocks according to their characteristics and properties.
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Insects Around Us
Students fill out worksheets about insects and how they are helpful to our world. In this insects lesson plan, students learn about flower parts and insects that pollinate them.
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Building Up, Breaking Down
Students investigate how rocks are modified into construction materials. In this building up and breaking down lesson plan, students explore what happens to building materials over time and how people modify natural materials. Students...
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Destructive Impact of Environment on Artifacts
Learners recognize that artifacts are destroyed over time. In this environmental factors on artifacts lesson, students experiment and observe through the microscope to find the environmental impact on artifacts. Learners make...
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The Chemistry of Ceramics
Students compare the characteristics of a fired porcelain sculpture to the clay used to create it. They discuss the physical and chemical changes that occur in the clay as it is heated and then create their own clay sculpture. This...
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The Chemistry of Ceramics
Students make ceramic sculptures to understand how clay works. In this sculpture lesson, students learn about porcelain sculptures to understand how heat can turn clay into a hard ceramic surface. They then experiment with clay to make...
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A Basin Filled With Time
Students use fossil leaves and a mathematical formula to study climate change. In this climate change and fossil lesson plan, students determine the differences in temperatures during two different times during the Cenozoic era using...
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A Tale of a Whale: And Why It Can Be Told
Young scholars examine the characteristics of particular whales. In this whale characteristics instructional activity, students discover the methods scientists use to track whales and attempt to match the unique pattern of callosities...
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Exploring the Planets
Students study robotic spacecrafts that have provided detailed information about the inner and outer planets. In this exploring the planets lesson plan, students use posters and diagrams to study the various robotic spacecraft sent to...
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Colors
Students learn about the Impressionist painters' use of color and how it connected to early nineteenth century scientific theories about color. For this colors lesson plan, students explore combinations of primary and secondary colors,...