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.

A cemetery provides an ideal location for student investigative research. Cemeteries are easily accessible in all communities and provide a field location for a non-cookbook style of laboratory activity. Students can examine tombstone weathering rates, reinforcing rock identification. Students may collect cemetery demographic data, comparing the longevity and survivorship data with local environmental events and impacts.

The purpose of this lesson is to see how astronomers use crater counts (more precisely, crater densities) to estimate the age of an object’s surface and how, from that, we can infer that impacts were very important in the early history of the Solar System

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.

In this activity students will make claims prior to seeing any data and complete a mapping activity that creates a geological time scale to help them use evidence to support or refute their claims. 

This classroom exercise is intended to be an introductory Earth Science activity to prepare students to look at time on the large scale and to discuss plate tectonics and rock records.

This is an activity that was modified from PDE's SAS resource portal.  It offers two mini activities, one student investigation and one teaching demonstration, for exploring the movement of convection currents. This lesson is set up to have students use Claim, Evidence and Reasoning to both predict and analyze the investigations.

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.

Sedimentary rocks provide insight into the changing environments of the past. Students should already know how to identify several key sedimentary rock types, and have an understanding of the conditions under which they formed. In this exercise students will look at sedimentary sequences that record the history of the western United States from the PreCambrian through the age of the dinosaurs. Students will evaluate data on two different spatial scales: (a) variations within Grand Canyon, and (b) differences between rocks at the western and eastern ends of Grand Canyon.