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.

A geotechnical engineer is a type of civil engineer who focuses on the mechanics of the land, rocks, and soils in the building process. This type of engineering includes, but is not limited to, analyzing, designing, and constructing foundations, retaining structures, slopes, embankments, roadways, tunnels, levees, wharves, landfills, and other systems that are comprised of rock or soil.

In this activity, students investigate three different soil samples with varying moisture content. They use a soil moisture probe to determine the percentage (by volume) of water in each of the soil samples.

This mini-lesson guides students' observations of soil moisture anomalies (how much the moisture content was above or below the norm) for the continental US in May 2018.

In this activity students will make observations about the objects, size, distance, and motion of the Sun, Earth, and Moon during a solar eclipse.

The Solar Eclipse Implementation Sequence provides a series of lesson plans for students to learn about solar eclipses.

This hands-on activity is the construction of an extended coverage area of eclipse glasses to provide extra protection for safely viewing a solar eclipse. This makes it harder to look outside the lenses on the eclipse glasses.

In this activity, students explore three indicators of drought are: soil moisture, lack of precipitation, and decreased streamflows. Students investigate each of these parameters develop a sense for the effects of drought on land.

Students will examine air temperature data collected through The GLOBE Program during the 2017 US solar eclipse.

Students review Earth System phenomena that are affected by soil moisture.  They analyze and evaluate maps of seasonal global surface air temperature and soil moisture data from NASA satellites. Building from their observations, students will select a location in the U.S.