It’s warm outside. The sun is shining bright and white cumulus clouds drift in the blue skies. You notice your students’ eyes wandering outside as you are trying to find ways to keep their’ minds engaged in their science class. You are desperately wishing that you could take your students out of doors while also […]

Students can look at a globe or map and readily see that water dominates our planet. However, do students know that over 70 percent of the earth’s surface is covered by water? Do they realize the importance of the oceans?
Currently, 80 percent of all people live within 60 miles of a seacoast. Yet many adolescents still do not think […]

Looking for a way to incorporate real data into your science class? Or maybe you want to work on evidence-based claims and reasoning. Perhaps you need an engaging way to tackle the subject of climate change. This lesson uses polar bears and sea ice data to promote critical thinking within the context of an important […]

Our August 28 blog entry focused on developing concepts related to the methods in and nature of science. In that post, titled “Put On a Happy Face!,” the inspiration came from scientific investigation of the relationship between suggestive language and involuntary contractions of facial muscles. The goals of that post were to help teachers assist […]

Very soon we will meet our new students and their parents. Everyone is excited but a bit nervous and perhaps anxious. Intuitively, we know smiling will help put others at ease. Everyone has heard the old wives’ tale that it takes more muscles to frown than to smile; thus, smile more and decrease the energy […]

Bats, caves, danger and exotic locales. That should catch your students’ attention! The big story here is the co-evolution of viruses and their nonhuman animal hosts, who seem to have a harmless, symbiotic relationship with viruses that cause deadly outbreaks in humans. Though this story is about Marburg virus and a fruit bat, the concepts […]

How many species were described for the first time in the literature in 2007? Five hundred? 1,000? 10,000? Would you believe 18, 516? That’s right, in a single calendar year! “The majority of the 18,516 species described (named) in 2007 were invertebrate animals (75.6 percent), vascular plants (11.1 percent) and vertebrates (6.7 percent),” reports ScienceDaily.com […]

Forensic science is always interesting to students. The mystery and puzzle solving are hard to resist. Here’s a real case you can use to get students thinking scientifically while integrating knowledge of insect life cycles—a timely topic for spring. The NYtimes.com reports how the unsolved cause of death of a woman in Las Vegas was […]

Thirty, twenty-nine, maybe thirty-two? How many days until we start our summer break? If you have a fabulous summer vacation planned, you are probably aware of the exact number! Maybe you plan on hiking one of the U.S. national parks or rafting a wild river. Or perhaps your plans take you to more exotic locales […]

An oxymoron? Perhaps, but 500 million years ago, such a creature roamed the vast seas. That was before the dinosaurs and concurrent with the Cambrian explosion. Scientists who put the fossil parts together described the giant shrimp this way:

. . . this underwater predator had a segmented body, a pair of claws and a circular […]