This is a unit plan where students will understand how Earth is systems of interacting components (spheres) and how changing one sphere will affect another. The carbon cycle is studied in quantity of carbon in each reservoir and how human and natural processes move carbon from one reservoir to another in two different time scales. The carbon cycle is studied qualitatively through demonstrations or labs with students developing models of the from of carbon in each reservoir.

This resource was created by Judy Prewett, in collaboration with Dawn DeTurk, Hannah Blomstedt, and Julie Albrecht, as part of ESU2's Integrating the Arts project. This project is a four year initiative focused on integrating arts into the core curriculum through teacher education, practice, and coaching.

In this activity, students will learn about and apply the Laws of Physics to successfully launch and land a raw egg. The activity frames the problem around designing and building a bottle rocket that will protect a raw egg being launched into the air at least seven meters. Resources included in this lesson are found at the bottom of this document and include:

-Teacher guide
-Physics note sheets on motion, speed, velocity, acceleration, momentum, force, friction, Newton’s Laws of Motion, potential and kinetic energy and gravity.
-Egg Launch Instructions
-Link to Bottle Rocket Launching Instructions
-Links to videos
-Post Assessment

Learn about conservation of energy with a skater dude! Build tracks, ramps and jumps for the skater and view the kinetic energy, potential energy and friction as he moves. You can also take the skater to different planets or even space!

Students will: Predict the kinetic and potential energy of objects Design a skate park Examine how kinetic and potential energy interact with each other

This unit covers the broad spectrum of topics that make-up our very amazing human body. Students are introduced to the space environment and learn the major differences between the environment on Earth and that of outer space. The engineering challenges that arise because of these discrepancies are also discussed. Then, students dive into the different components that make up the human body: muscles, bones and joints, the digestive and circulatory systems, the nervous and endocrine systems, the urinary system, the respiratory system, and finally the immune system. Students learn about the different types of muscles in the human body and the effects of microgravity on muscles. Also, they learn about the skeleton, the number of and types of bones in the body, and how outer space affects astronauts' bones. In the lessons on the digestive, circulatory, nervous and endocrine systems, students learn how these vital system work and the challenges faced by astronauts whose systems are impacted by spaceflight. And lastly, advances in engineering technology are discussed through the lessons on the urinary, respiratory and immune systems while students learn how these systems work with all the other body components to help keep the human body healthy.

Exploring Climate Science With Virtual Reality, a Teacher/Scientist Partnership experience. High school teachers engage with working scientists and engineers to for content learning for climate science and virtual reality and engage in follow-up sessions with professional development facilitators to develop pedagogical expertise for use in creating formative classroom tasks that are formative and productive. It is a three day initial workshop with four follow-up days to
1) deepen teacher understanding by learning with climate scientists to understand climate science standards content knowledge
2) increase awareness and knowledge of the use of virtual reality devices in climate science learning
30 to co-develop a climate science simulation game for use on Oculus Go devices with teachers, their students and a virtual reality scientist/engineer team
4) to develop and implement embedded formative classroom tasks that
complement climate science learning by using a relevant, place based phenomena, and provide insights into student thinking and productive next steps in learning.

Creative Commons License CC BY
Exploring Climate Science With Virtual Reality Professional Learning Module by Georgia Boatman, ESD 123 and Peggy Willcuts PNNL is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This resource was created by Whittney Carnahan, in collaboration with Dawn DeTurk, Hannah Blomstedt, and Julie Albrecht, as part of ESU2's Integrating the Arts project. This project is a four year initiative focused on integrating arts into the core curriculum through teacher education, practice, and coaching.

This resource was created by Sharla Hanzlik, in collaboration with Dawn DeTurk, Hannah Blomstedt, and Julie Albrecht, as part of ESU2's Integrating the Arts project. This project is a four year initiative focused on integrating arts into the core curriculum through teacher education, practice, and coaching.

Students are introduced to the important concept of density with a focus is on the more easily understood densities of solids. Students use different methods to determine the densities of solid objects, including water displacement to determine volumes of irregularly-shaped objects. By comparing densities of various solids to the density of water, and by considering the behavior of different solids when placed in water, students conclude that ordinarily, objects with densities greater than water sink, while those with densities less than water float. Then they explore the principle of buoyancy, and through further experimentation arrive at Archimedes' principle that a floating object displaces a mass of water equal to its own mass. Students may be surprised to discover that a floating object displaces more water than a sinking object of the same volume.

Explore the forces at work when you try to push a filing cabinet. Create an applied force and see the resulting friction force and total force acting on the cabinet. Charts show the forces, position, velocity, and acceleration vs. time. View a Free Body Diagram of all the forces (including gravitational and normal forces).

This resource was created by Moe Martin, in collaboration with Dawn DeTurk, Hannah Blomstedt, and Julie Albrecht, as part of ESU2's Integrating the Arts project. This project is a four year initiative focused on integrating arts into the core curriculum through teacher education, practice, and coaching.

Understanding geologic time is a core idea in science that has deep connections to other areas of geology (e.g.,
plate tectonics), biology (e.g., evolution), and astronomy (e.g., planetary science). The topic, however, is
challenging for students to understand because of enormous timescale of the Earth. Therefore, students need to
make sense of the 4.6 billion year history of Earth as well as the history of life on Earth. This requires an
understanding of the depositional environments that create rock strata for us to read, relative dating ideas such
as the principle of superposition and the use of index fossils, and absolute dating techniques such as radiometric
dating. Taken together, these topics provide students not only an understanding of the history of the Earth, but
an understanding of how we have pieced this history together with multiple forms of evidence.

In this 5 lesson set, students learn about the foraging behavior of bees and hypothesize if the bee’s behavior is related to its ability to detect sugar. Students will then determine which type of foraging bee would be best for pollination or honey production. Students will learn about the process of gel electrophoresis as a genetic tool and analyze DNA to identify strains of bees who are better pollen-collecting bees or better nectar-collecting bees.

This resource was created by Kim Francis in collaboration with Lynn Bowder as part of ESU2's Mastering the Arts project. This project is a four year initiative focused on integrating arts into the core curriculum through teacher education and experiential learning. 

Visualize the gravitational force that two objects exert on each other. Change properties of the objects in order to see how it changes the gravity force.

Move the sun, earth, moon and space station to see how it affects their gravitational forces and orbital paths. Visualize the sizes and distances between different heavenly bodies, and turn off gravity to see what would happen without it!

Students use gumdrops and toothpicks to make lithium atom models. Using these models, they investigate the makeup of atoms, including their relative size. Students are then asked to form molecules out of atoms, much in the same way they constructed atoms out of the particles that atoms are made of. Students also practice adding and subtracting electrons from an atom and determining the overall charges on atoms.

This resource was created by Terresa Greenleaf, in collaboration with Dawn DeTurk, Hannah Blomstedt, and Julie Albrecht, as part of ESU2's Integrating the Arts project. This project is a four year initiative focused on integrating arts into the core curriculum through teacher education, practice, and coaching.

The students will be exploring the concept of radioactive decay and half-life. They will be completing an activity, followed by discussion and and calculations. After discussion, the students will be completing a PHET simulation.