Earth Science

Ramp up understanding of Earth's layers with a lab, booklet, model, worksheets, and assessment. Activities focus on the crust, mantle, outer core, and inner core. Students learn the thickness, temperature, and composition of each layer, and get a brief introduction to the lithosphere and asthenosphere.

Use models to describe ways Earth’s systems interact. After instruction, 22 worksheets ask kids to analyze events, identify which of the spheres (geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, or atmosphere) caused the interaction and which were affected.

Geology rocks! If your class is into minerals, this unit is for you. It focuses on types, properties, identification, fossils, and cycle. Worksheets, activities, games, video links, and assessment provide a complete six-day learning sequence.

Kids use math and science to learn more about organisms from long ago. They count and measure fossils to generate data, create picture and bar graphs, solve subtraction problems, and make line plots.

Students explore rock formations and fossil evidence to explain changes over time. Science activities, text with images, and worksheets let kids explore fossil types, simulate records in the layers, and analyze organisms found in sedimentary rocks.

Engage your kids with six hands-on labs that simulate slow changes to Earth’s surface! Follow up with worksheets or sorting to discriminate between weathering, erosion, and deposition. Review and assessment are also included.

A variety of volcano projects engage kids in mapping, measuring, research, and more. This set includes a blank world map with latitude and longitude lines, two tables of information about recent volcanic activity, terminology, directions, template for investigation, and 50 cards for student assignments, sorting, etc.

Looking for a simple way to teach or reinforce climate? Try this! Students color basic zones on a map of the world, consider additional factors, and complete a matching activity. Two versions of each worksheet are included: color and grayscale.

Check out this awesome interdisciplinary project. Each student analyzes weather data from one or two of 50 states. They color charts, or tables, to categorize temperature and precipitation; find patterns; describe the climate; list numbers from high to low; create picture, bar, and/or line graphs; and compare states.

Yes, you can teach kids how to read weather maps! In this set of lessons and activities, kids in fourth or fifth grade identify symbols, analyze fronts, predict, and forecast. It includes printable pages in grayscale and color.

Thinking of setting up a weather station at school or home? Try this set of instructional posters, daily charts, weekly tables and graphs. Vocabulary sheets, review and quiz are also included.

This interdisciplinary project merges science, engineering design, and writing. Kids define problems with needs, criteria, and constraints; analyze weather-related hazards and solutions; develop opinions with claims and evidence; and write paragraphs. As a culmination, they design solutions themselves.

Students learn about the hydrosphere and distribution of water on Earth. Activities include reading differentiated texts, graphing, answering questions, and practicing nonfiction text structure. As a culmination, students may create an infographic to show what they’ve learned.

Kids explore properties of water through a series of hands-on science experiments: evaporation, cohesion, adhesion, solvency, and capillary action. The simple (and fun) activities engage students like never before - and allow them to achieve deeper conceptualization.

Kids simulate the water cycle in a baggie. Then they deepen their understanding with diagrams, pictorial vocabulary sheet, a fun project, practice, and quiz. 

After learning about motion in the ocean, fourth and fifth grade students use the engineering design process to build their own simulators. This STEM challenge focuses on transverse waves.

Through these activities and experiments, fourth and fifth grade students explore currents with labs, passages, maps, and videos. They simulate salinity and temperature differences in the ocean. In addition, they learn about tides and patterns of water movement.

In this set of water pollution activities, students explore how humans impact the environment. After watching a video and reading passages, they conduct an experiment. The lab explores eutrophication of lake water, which is caused by excess nutrients.

Now kids can learn how humans adress natural disasters through the engineering design process. They learn to define a problem, identify criteria and constraints, brainstorm, build a prototype, design and carry out a fair test. 

Activities focus on ways to reduce impacts of natural disasters (floods, volcanoes, erosion, tsunamis, earthquakes).

Which vehicles are best for the environment? Students research or read about fuel types and compare them. As a culmination to the environmental science project, they participate in a STEM activity and design their own “green” cars.

Which source of electricity is best for the environment? Kids read passages about fossil fuels, the greenhouse effect, and seven types of electrical energy. Then they analyze and compare to determine which type should be used.

In what ways do communities use science ideas to protect the environment? First, this series of activities reviews natural resources and provides background information on Earth’s water. Then fourth or fifth grade students explore the wastewater treatment process and determine which science concepts helped with development. Finally, they write an essay to explain.