Embedded Files
An inquiry into rights and responsibilities in the struggle to share finite resources with other people and with other living things; communities and the relationships within and between them; access to equal opportunities; peace and conflict resolution.
Central Idea: Humans create solutions to manage finite resources
Lines of Inquiry:
✦ Protection of Earth's resources
✦ Earth's materials and systems interact
✦ Water is a valuable natural resource
Mystery Science Watery Planet Lesson #2
In this lesson, students explore how incredibly salty the ocean is, even though we can't see the salt! In the activity, Tiny Ocean, students create a model ocean to observe how salt seems to completely vanish when dissolved in water. Students then measure and graph quantities of the water and salt to provide evidence that, even though we can’t see it, the salt still weighs the same amount. Students also create a model salt flat, allowing the water to evaporate, leaving the salt behind.
PLANTS
Students used a CO2 detector in a transparent vessel and observed the the CO2 level go up when they breathed out and into their vessel and down as the plants began to take in or "eat up" the CO2.
ATMOSPHERE - BIOSPHERE
Making a Cloud (Atmosphere/Hydrosphere)
DIGGING FOR WATER
The Walking Classroom
In this model, students learned that glaciers are thick sheets of ice. As they move, they scrape and grind the underlying ground. Valleys formed by glaciers end to be U-shaped. Glaciers can move soil and rocks far from their source and deposit them hundreds of miles away. As the ice melts, the material carried by the glacier is left behind. Smaller rocks and soil often form teardrop-shaped mounds called drumlins. Large boulders are called erratics and can weigh several tons.
Erratic State Park Natural Site in Oregon
HYDROSPHERE - GEOSPHERE
PHYTOPLANKTON
With some 10,000 to 20,000 different species in the world’s oceans, the diversity of phytoplankton (phyto from the Greek for plant) species is extremely rich. Phytoplankton form a key element of ocean ecosystems and life on this planet, producing more oxygen than all the world’s rainforests combined. They also serve as the fundamental basis of the marine food chain. Students made phytoplankton that could flink.
HYDROSPHERE - BIOSPHERE
STORYBOARD THAT - THE DUST BOWL
The Dust Bowl of the 1930s hurt not only farmers, but the American economy in general. Crop failures caused great stress on the trade and sale of many consumer goods. In turn, this caused even greater stress on the economy as a whole. Using a spider map, students identified and explained the significance of the Dust Bowl and its role in the Great Depression using the 5 Ws. This analysis will provide further insight into how many average American workers and farmers were affected by it.Students answered the following questions:- WHO did the Dust Bowl affect?
- WHAT was the Dust Bowl?
- WHEN did the Dust Bowl occur?
- WHERE did it take place?
- WHY is the Dust Bowl important to the Depression?
Storyboard That - A Long Walk to Water
Students created a storyboard that identifies recurring themes in A Long Walk to Water. They Illustrated instances of each theme and wrote a short description below each cell.
Students carried buckets of water and were able to simulate the struggles that the main characters in A Long Walk to Water went through to access water, which allowed them to appreciate the resources they have readily available to them.
In this activity, students chose any poem that we’ve read in the novel Out of the Dust, and rewrote it from a different character’s point of view. They also included an illustration using an art medium of their choice.
In this lesson, students explored how solid rock breaks apart into smaller pieces through a process called weathering. Students used sugar cubes as models for rocks (geosphere). Students were given closed containers to put sugar cubes in and shake. The shaking represents the wind (atmosphere) weathering and eroding the sugar away (geosphere).
In this experiment, students made a rain cloud in a jar. The shaving cream represents the clouds and the water represents the air. The colored water represents rain. As the colored water saturates the “cloud”, it gets heavy and eventually is so heavy that it can no longer hold the water. It “rains” (hydropshere) down into the jar – through the “air" (atmosphere).
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