Most people are familiar with Shel Silverstein's poem "Where the Sidewalk Ends", but do they know where and why sidewalks crack? It's a valid and worthy question, and this handy educational activity from Charles Onasch of Bowling Green State University explains just that. Here, students will learn to use fractures in sidewalks as an analog for natural outcrops and also learn how to make systematic...

Rice University's Earth Science Department offers the Discovering Plate Boundaries educational activity. The exercise is described as a "data rich exercise to help students discover the processes that occur at plate tectonic boundaries" and has been used successfully with 5th graders to undergraduates. The site provides the necessary downloads of maps; earthquake, volcanic, seafloor, topographic,...

Part of NASA's classroom of the future program, the Earth Science Explorer site contains a virtual tour of a castle that contains several floors of varying topics. The earth floor has a plate tectonics, geologic time, biomes, diversity, cycles, spheres, and an adaptation room to explore. The site also has a dinosaur floor with interesting information as well as a teacher's resource area and a...

Created and maintained by the Massachusetts Geological Survey, this set of remarkable resources is the perfect thing for earth science teachers working with high school and college students. Adapted from original resources from the from the Maine Geologic Survey and the Kentucky Geologic Survey, these resources are organized into nine areas, including Lesson Plans, College Educators, and Fact...

The Nebraska Earth Science Education Network has as one of its objectives to promote and enhance K-12 earth science education. The Web site provides lesson plans on various subjects including astronomy, geology, mapping, soils, water, and weather. Each submitted lesson gives a recommended grade level and contains objectives, materials needed, procedures, and conclusions, depending on the activity....

The RocksForKids site is produced by two amateur, Canadian "rockhounds" and collectors, actually a K-12 teacher and an architect. The site provides introductory information and Web links on rocks and minerals for school children. Topics include: How Rocks & Minerals are formed, Identification of Rocks & Minerals and Uses of Rocks & Minerals. There is also a section for teachers offering...

From the National Park Service comes the Teachers Corner Web site on Badlands National Park. The lesson plans offered include erosion in a box, understanding rock layers, making dirt, muddying the waters, and more. Each lesson page gives a suggested grade range, key concepts, background, materials, procedure, results, and a why section that explains the scientific reasons behind the results. The...

Those in the know are aware that when educators from the Midwest convene, good things are bound to happen. That is most certainly the case with this set of resources for teaching quantitative skills, which arose from a series of workshops held over the past few years and from faculty editors and staff at the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College. Visitors will want to peruse such...

Teachers looking for ways to incorporate dynamic visuals into their earth science courses need look no further than this fine site. Created by staff members at the department of earth science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the site contains dozens of interactive animations and visualization tools that can be used in the classroom to demonstrate various processes. These resources...

Maintained by the BBC Education Web site, The Rock Cycle Experiments page contains ten activities related to the rock cycle, beginning with weathering and ending with the uplift of rocks. Each activity pops up after clicking the link within the very well done interactive diagram of the rock cycle. The activities are simple but effective; for example, the transportation lesson has students run...