Learning Activities

In this activity, students connect art and science by creating a drawing and conceptual model of the thermohaline circulation. Students get to create drawings to understand how water moves in the ocean and the impacts of that movement.

This lesson provides a demonstration and lesson focused on ocean currents. The demonstration of how cold water and warm water interact is a strong learning tool for the topic.

This visualization depicts the global water cycle. It includes how human water use affects where water is stored, how it moves, and how clean it is.

In this activity, students demonstrate their knowledge of connections between natural systems and the built environment in which they live.

This resource from NOAA provides a full unit on observation vs. modeling. It includes a series of 8 activities that use a virtual reality model and graphs to introduce concepts in the construction and application of scientific models. Students will use observations to create and validate models with a temperature and fisheries management case study and understand how the simplicity and assumptions of a model will effect its forecasting power.

Through the five lessons in this module, students will explore relationships between carbon dioxide, ocean pH, and aragonite saturation state. By examining these parameters using interactive graphs and models, students can predict whether ocean conditions support the growth and survival of shell-building marine life, both now and in the future.

This self-paced online resource from NOAA explores the relationship between water quality and estuarine ecology through a series of 5 levels that range from one to two 45 minute class periods.

This resource uses datasets, videos, text, and discussions to support an understanding of patterns in megafires under climate change conditions. This resource provides an excellent scientific overview of the wildfires impacting the Western United States. It includes expert interviews, data, and model creation that all involve sound science. It looks at cause and effect to consider the future of wildfires.

Through this resource from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), students will define, investigate, and answer questions about what caused the megadrought in the Colorado River Basin from 2000-2021. This lesson uses text, contextual videos, and datasets from NOAA and NASA to teach the concepts of megadrought and evapotranspiration.

In this activity, students analyze and interpret data on the reproduction of moss campion plants to explore how increasing temperatures could impact these specialized tundra plants.