Sally Ride EarthKAM (Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students) is a NASA educational outreach program that enables students, teachers, and the public to learn about Earth from the unique perspective of space.

During Sally Ride EarthKAM missions (periods when the Sally Ride EarthKAM camera is operational), middle school students around the world request images of specific locations on Earth.

This exercise challenges students to think about the extent sea ice grows and melts each year and how sea ice coverage in the Arctic Circle changes with time. Students utilize the National Snow and Ice Data Center's Sea Ice Animation Tool (link is external) to explore these changes in the Northern Hemisphere.

In this activity students will explore watersheds in their local area, as well as those pertinent to discussion of the human impact on the watersheds in their own area and globally in areas with water problems.

There are websites and curricular materials to assist teachers with classroom instruction relating to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.  Although it is important for students to be familiar with the current disaster, it is just as important for students to examine the historic occurrence and context of past oil spills from across the globe.  Fortunately, a Google Earth file exists that contains location information and details of oil spills.  We have modified this file to assist teachers in engaging students to explore the spatial and temporal distribution of global oil spill disasters.

There are many variations of this exercise to have students generate the plot to the left, but I follow the Carbon Dioxide Exercise from the SERC website, where "Students work in groups, plotting carbon dioxide concentrations over time on overheads and estimating the rate of change over five years.

NOTE: Teachers may want to start with the PAESTA Classroom exercise Investigating Streamflow in the Schuylkill River and then use this one as a follow on.

This exercise is presented in a jigsaw format but can be easily scaled to lower grade levels, where students prepare and/or are presented just one graph from one location for one period of time.  Note that once the data is accessed on the USGS website, the data can be downloaded to work with in Excel, or (as this exercise suggests) a data table can be printed off for students to create graphs from.  To help students visualize the units in which streamflow is measured, cubic feet per second (cfs), I bring to class a 1 ft x 1 ft x 1 ft box to show them what a cubic foot looks like.

There are two goals for this activity - the first is to introduce a particular piece of planetarium software we used in our instructional setting, called Starry Night.  The scientific goal is to see that the planets (and perhaps other Solar System objects, like Ceres & Eris) show a pattern in their location on the sky, which is that they are always along (or near) the Ecliptic, which runs through the Zodiac constellations.

This is a revision of the Weight Though the Universe lesson found online from the Eisenhower Regional Consortium for Mathematics and Science Education at AEL (the original document is the first attachment below).  We revised the original version to one that uses the CER (Claim Evidence Reasoning) format. We have also included a student note format and a assessment rubric.

GeoMapApp is a free, map-based data exploration and visualization tool (see http://www.geomapapp.org).  Using this tool, we can explore how comparison of topography along different boundaries, both ancient and active, can provide a means for students to grasp the immense spatial scales involved in earth processes.