This activity is one of a series in the collection, The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change activities. 

The purpose of this activity is for students to create a desktop soil profile based on the biome region of the United States where your school is located.

In this activity, you will use an inexpensive spectrophotometer* to test how light at different visible wavelengths (blue, green, red) is transmitted, or absorbed, through four different colored water samples.

This learning activity uses data acquired by the TOPEX/Poseidon altimeter, a joint project of NASA and the French Space Agency, to investigate the relationship between the topography of a sea-floor feature and the topography of the overlying sea surface.

In this activity, students will model  the geometry of solar eclipses by plotting a few points on a piece of graph paper, and using quarters and a nickel to represent the Sun and Moon (not to scale). 

In this lesson, Observing Earth’s Seasonal Changes, students observe patterns of average snow and ice amounts as they change from one month to another, as well as connect the concepts of the tilt and orbit of the Earth (causing the changing of seasons) with monthly snow/ice data from January 2008

In this activity, students will learn about sea ice and land ice. They will observe ice melting on a solid surface near a body of water and ice melting in a body of water.

In this activity, students will analyze past and future eclipse data and orbital models to determine why we don’t experience eclipses every month.

Students will investigate the role of clouds and their contribution (if any) to global warming. Working in cooperative groups, students will make a claim about the future role clouds will play in Earth’s Energy Budget if temperatures continue to increase.

This Lesson Plan provides some generic maps, graphs, and data tables for use with the Data Literacy Cubes. Because it is a differentiated resource, this Lesson Plan is appropriate for multiple grade bands.