This lesson is taken from NASA's Phytopia: Discovery of the Marine Ecosystem written in partnership with Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Science with funding from the National Science Foundation.

Students watch videos and/or review articles related to particulate matter and how this pollutant is monitored and measured, then provide their understanding individually or in groups.

In this activity, students will model the geometry of solar eclipses using quarters to represent the Sun and Moon (not to scale).

In this lesson students will calculate the size to distance ratio of the Sun and the Moon from Earth to determine how a solar eclipse can occur.

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). 

Learners will build a 2D model of the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) Spacecraft model. 

Using a “fun-size” bag of rainbow bite-sized candies learners will place different colored candies on a diagram of the Sun-Earth system to show different space weather conditions during solar minimum and solar maximum.

The purpose of this activity is to have students use an Earth Systems perspective to identify the various causes associated with changes to Earth's forests as they review Landsat imagery of site locations from around the world.

In this activity, learners will explore an additional tool used to observe the Sun’s atmosphere, called a coronagraph. Learners will create a flipbook of a coronagraph showing a coronal mass ejection.

Students use Phytopia: Exploration of the Marine Ecosystem, a computer-based tool, to investigate various phytoplankton species and topics relating to phytoplankton biology.