Although there is a great deal of historical information about aerodynamics that could be discussed here, we purposely narrowed the stream of resources to those that encourage students to experiment with technological design and function.

The resources highlighted here aim to reflect students' growing mathematical capacity over the span of the middle school years. The activities and lessons, intended as supplementary materials, range from introduction to the fundamentals of algebra to work on linear functions. Uniformly, they take into consideration the preference of the middle school student for concrete models, visual representations, and interactive tasks.

The resources selected for this publication will help your students understand chemistry at work, using examples that will spark their interest. A basic understanding of chemistry concepts and terminology will prepare them for more abstract studies.

This publication offers online resources that connect mathematics to three subject areas: social studies, art, and science. Each section contains lesson plans, problems to solve, and examples of mathematics at work within contexts not usually associated with school mathematics.

In Data Analysis: As Real World As It Gets, we feature resources for teaching about data and statistics as supported by the NCTM Standards (NCTM, 2000). Data collection and analysis can be an avenue into the meaningful mathematics and problem-solving skills needed by students in the twenty-first century. And an answer to the student question, Why do we have to study math? can be found when teaching mathematics with a real-world statistics approach.

This publication about energy transfers and energy transformations features hand-selected online resources for middle school science teachers. An introduction notes the ubiquitous nature of energy movements and conversions.

Not a geology major or mathematician? No worries! This publication contains resources designed to do three things. The first is to complement teacher content knowledge and its relationship to the nature of geologic science. Geology is not a laboratory-based science lending itself to traditional notions of controlled experiments; rather it is a historical science requiring different methods. Second, we supply teachers with hands-on/minds-on lessons to develop student understanding, and third, we provide career-oriented resources to expose students to scientists whose work involves concepts in geologic time.

The online resources featured in Geometry in 3-D actively engage students in exploring a variety of geometric shapes, at times through lessons that involve building models or creating paper nets that fold into three-dimensional shapes.

What if your skateboard had only two wheels, not four? What if it could go uphill without one foot pushing off the street? Then you wouldn’t have a skateboard, you’d have a wave board! And you’d be "street surfing," not skateboarding. So why not call it a "street surf board?" After all, there are no waves in the street. Or are there? The wave board requires the rider to generate mechanical wave motion in order to roll. Can your students relate its technology to the science of simple machines?

Geometry can be an exercise arena for strengthening those logic muscles that middle school students need to flex. When we work with a geometric figure—a circle, for instance—and apply the ancient tools of compass and straightedge, geometry can become a rich ground for developing design. And a circle has size, so a unit on this topic necessarily brings in the mathematics of its measurement. Circles, then, is a geometric topic that can provide mental challenge, opportunity for artistic development, and connections to both the history of measurement and its everyday applications.
For this unit we have selected online activities that will enable your students to look at circles from these various viewpoints. The activities range from measurement to theorems about the circle to art and symmetry. Many will engage students in solving problems or in creating designs. Others will allow them to investigate the thinking behind the area and circumference formulas, either through virtual simulations or hands-on projects. We hope these activities will add to your repertoire of ways to present the "many-sided" topic of circles.

In this publication, you will find web sites that provide information for teachers as well as lesson plans and activities for use in the classroom. In addition to looking at how we can help children to establish good habits, you will find web sites that look at the health issues facing preteens and teenagers today. How many kids need help evaluating their diets and taking a good look at their food consumption? Most likely all of them. With this in mind, there will be many opportunities to examine current guidelines for a healthy diet and to discuss the impact weight gain has on the body image of young people.

Physical Science Content Standard B of the National Science Education Standards encompasses transfer of energy and specifically states, Light interacts with matter by transmission (including refraction), absorption, or scattering (including reflection). We begin with early investigations into the nature of light that culminated in the current understanding of the nature of light, both visible and invisible as the same physical laws apply to the entire electromagnetic spectrum. From there students are ready to explore the interaction of light with various surfaces, producing a variety of perceptible effects. Finally, students will be able to apply their knowledge through construction, critique, and assessment of their own optical devices or interpretation of optically derived data.

Middle school teachers will find online resources in this publication that were hand-picked to assist them in teaching about evolution, the unifying theory in biological science.

This online publication contains middle school level problems that demonstrate how people actually use mathematical thinking in concrete settings. Several activities challenge students to deepen their understanding of numbers, especially fractions and decimals.

What is the difference between weather and climate? What do the oceans have to do with them? Weather is the day-to-day state of the atmosphere and its short-term (minutes to weeks) variation.
This publication is all about developing your students’ understandings of earth’s oceans and the major effect they have on climate. Understanding and interpreting local weather data and understanding the relationship between weather and climate are important first steps to understanding larger-scale global climate changes.

This publication offers a sampling of exciting activities and animations to support students as they piece together the plate tectonics puzzle.

The ecosystem concept is rather complex, but students often find these interactions interesting and are usually easily engaged in ecosystem studies. You can then capitalize on student curiosity by providing a learning environment conducive to inquiry.

This electronic publication offers middle school teachers select resources that they can use when teaching about the prototype development stage of the design process. Engineers engage in the design process when they are developing new products.

A central theme in the middle school mathematics curriculum, proportional reasoning is based on making sense of ratios in a variety of contexts. The resources chosen for this unit provide practice in solving problems, often informally, in the format of ga