Working individually or in groups, students explore the concept of stress (compression) through physical experience and math. They discover why it hurts more to poke themselves with mechanical pencil lead than with an eraser. Then they prove why this is so by using the basic equation for stress and applying the concepts to real engineering problems.

This video describes the role of the brain in regulating body temperature and how sometimes fever is employed to fight off infection.

In this activity, the students will investigate a variety of plants and animals common to the Amazon through research. They will determine the plant or animal characteristics that make them edible or useful for the trip and learn to categorize them by comparing similarities and/or differences.

This activity is takes place in nature and in the classroom. Students are gathering different types of leaves and naming characteristics of each then sorting them by those characteristics. Students then make a picture with leaves and writes 2-3 sentences about their picture using the characteristic words.

This is a unit for K-2 students on fish habitats. The last day is a field trip to a local lake.

Students can use this interactive Flash applet to practice subitizing and counting groups of objects, to understand the importance of 5 in our base-10 number system, and to learn basic addition facts. In the four included games students construct groups of 5 objects, add groups of objects within 10, and identify and record numbers within 10. Auditory prompts support students with limited reading ability.

This guided inquiry activity is designed to help students understand that people get all of their knowledge from their senses, and that is why our senses are so important.

In this lesson designed to enhance literacy skills, students learn about the unique environment of southern Florida's Everglades and gain insights into the interrelatedness of living things, nonliving things, and climate.

This video segment from NOVA: "The Killer's Trail" investigates the potential for DNA evidence to solve murder cases, even those from the distant past.

This video segment adapted from NOVA shows how scientists use the fossil record to trace when early human ancestors and related species began walking on two legs instead of four, and to determine whether they were more apelike or human in appearance.

This applet allows students to individually practice working with relationships among fractions and ways of combining fractions. It is an online, one person game, with immediate feedback on incorrect moves. All instructions for this fun visual game are included and illustrated.

Explore different representations for fractions. This applet allows students to create a fraction,then see it as a visual model, and as percent and decimal equivalents. They can choose the model to be a circle, a rectangle, or a set model. Intended for the young learner, this version restricts the numerator to values from 0 to 20, and the denominator to benchmark values of 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10 and 20.

This lesson fosters a student's conceptual fraction sense with proper fractions, improper fractions, and mixed numbers by placing thirty fraction cards in order between given whole numbers on a number line clothesline. Users will visually identify that all proper fractions are grouped between zero and one, and that improper fractions or mixed numbers are all grouped above one. Users also play an estimation game with groups using the same principle. Instructional plan, questions for the students, assessment options, extensions, and teacher reflections are given.

This lesson initiates the development of skills in collecting and recording data. First, learners read "Freckle Juice" by Judy Blume. Then, learners collect data about a partner's face and tally the data from the whole class. They learn the convention for displaying a set of five using tally marks. Then, learners create a pictograph and pose and answer questions about the data set. This lesson guide includes questions for learners, assessment options, extensions, and reflection questions.

Students study aquatic organisms in relation to the environmental conditions of lakes and streams. The course develops substantial quantities of data concerning the local watershed. This data is used by community partners in many contexts.

In this video excerpt from NOVA, find out how the discovery of a gene defect has led to the development of a new drug to treat patients with cystic fibrosis.

This video segment describes the basics of the circulatory system: how the heart pumps the blood that carries oxygen and nutrients throughout the body.

In this five lesson unit with overview from Illuminations, student activities explore relationships among fractions through work with the length model. Students construct fraction strips and use fraction bars throughout the unit to make sense of basic fraction concepts, to compare fractions and order fractions and to work with equivalency in fractions. Specific learning objectives, a material list, an instructional plan, questions for the students, assessment options, extensions, and teacher reflections are given for each lesson.