Classroom Activities

Students demonstrate their knowledge of interconnections between natural systems such as weather and climate and the built environment in which they live.

This Teaching Box combines readings and activities that utilize data to build student understanding of the changes that happen to the Pacific Ocean and atmosphere during an El Niño event.

Students learn about the urban heat island effect by investigating which areas of their schoolyard have higher temperatures. Then they analyze data about how the number of heat waves in an urban area has increased over time with population.

In this activity, students gather information about atmospheric scientific field projects in order to understand how a research question about the Earth system can be answered by collecting data using many different research platforms and instruments.

GLOBE Data Explorations are classroom activities that help students learn how to analyze GLOBE environmental data while also learning atmospheric science concepts and geography.

In this activity, students will construct models of the arrangement of water molecules in the three physical states. Students will understand that matter can be found in three forms or phases (solid, liquid, and gas).

Students brainstorm what the living conditions during the period known as the Little Ice Age (AD 1350–1850) might have been like. Then students study information about lifestyles, the economy, crop yields, and human and livestock mortality during the Little Ice Age. They compare and discuss what they have learned.

This hands-on inquiry activity allows students to explore how the color of materials that cover the Earth affects the amounts of sunlight it absorbs using a simple model.

In this activity, students will observe and measure the water given off through transpiration by a plant in a small terrarium.

In this activity, students will develop a model of a forest using plastic bottles and then observe and analyze changes in winds related to differences in forest density. 

Students will investigate how different surfaces of the Earth reflect and absorb heat and apply this knowledge to real-world situations.

Students use a simple model to explore how roof colors can impact the temperature of an urban area.

Students explore glaciers and other parts of the Earth system through photos from Alaska and identify how the environment changed in photos taken over the 20th century as the climate warmed.

Students identify sunspots on images of the Sun, discovering that the number, location, and size of spots are not always the same. During the first part of the activity, students make a graph that shows how the number of sunspots has changed over the past 30 years, discovering that there is a regular pattern to the number of sunspots (the 11-year sunspot cycle).

Students play the role of nitrogen atoms traveling through the nitrogen cycle to gain understanding of the varied pathways through the cycle and the relevance of nitrogen to living things.

Systems thinking is an important concept across the Earth sciences. In this game, students either are a part of a system or serve as scientists tasked with observing and making sense of the system moving in front of them.

  In this activity, students use a graph to make a hypothesis about the difference between urban heat in New York City streets and in Central Park.

A collection of educational activities and a comic book that explore what we can learn from using satellites to track animals from space.

In this activity, students will build a model to simulate parts of the water cycle. They will be able to recognize and explain the essential elements of the water cycle.

Students will use soda to explore how carbon dioxide is able to dissolve into liquid. They will learn about Henry's law, which describes how the solubility of gas into liquids is dependent on temperature, and develop hypotheses about how the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is affected by rising atmospheric and oceanic temperatures.