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Book Chapter
Optical Illusions: Seeing and Cognitive Construction
Optical illusions can be used as interactive, everyone-participates demonstrations to show teachers that the act of visual observation is not a passive, mindless, stimulus-response, camera-like operation. Optical illusions challenge simple notions of...
Book Chapter
Utensil Music: Teaching Sound Science
“Sound science” is more than just a play on words—it is a powerful metaphor for the mind-opening and mind-expanding effect of integrated curriculum, instruction, and assessment. This simple, hands-on exploration highlights the fact that hearing...
Book Chapter
Identification Detectives: Sounds and Smells of Science
This simple, hands-on exploration can be used to emphasize the role of sensory perception as a necessary antecedent to mental conception, the nature of science, and the pedagogical value of a “fun phenomena first.” While most hands-on exploratio...
Book Chapter
Two-Balloon Balancing Act: Constructivist Teaching
This activity explores LaPlace’s law where membranes exert pressure on their contents that decrease as the membranes are stretched to larger sizes and their thickness decreases. The internal pressure of a spherical balloon is inversely proportional...
Book Chapter
Batteries and Bulbs: Teaching is More Than Telling
This activity features a simple, three-component system that can be used to explore a variety of concepts including closed versus open electrical circuits and conductors versus insulators. It also can initiate further explanations into the design of ...
Book Chapter
Did you ever look out the window on a nice day and dream about what fun it would be to hold class outside? Your students probably feel the same way! Teaching outdoors is rewarding for both teachers and students, and this chapter offers many options f...
Book Chapter
Does Money Grow on School Yard Trees? Resources for Your Outdoor Classroom
Activities in this book may excite you, but how will you pay for them? Money does not grow on trees—even trees in a school yard. The challenge for environmental educators is to channel grant funds, donations of goods and services, and volunteer hel...
Book Chapter
It All Adds Up! Math + Science + Outdoors = Fun
Creative mathematics teachers will tell you that math is everywhere and science cannot be taught without math. When students are taken outdoors, they will find that math is everywhere. Many of the lessons in this chapter are for math patios, but some...
Book Chapter
Reading and Writing About Nature
The integration of science and language arts is an effective way for teachers to enhance students’ comprehension and critical thinking and the requirements of curriculum. Both writing and reading can be readily emphasized during science lessons. Th...
Book Chapter
Social Studies: Humans and the Outdoors
The history of humans interacting with the land is the perfect context for a number of outdoor learning experiences. Humans have relied on the Sun to tell time or on plants to provide food sources, shelter, and clothing. Science as a human endeavor a...
Book Chapter
This chapter introduces the topic of topography, including map use and interpretation. Activities are provided to help students apply their understanding of the topic to the form and structure of the actual landscape....
Book Chapter
Physical geography becomes a way to identify and better understand the components in the environment and the structure of the landscape. The activities in this chapter will help students build on their observational skills and begin to use interpreta...
Book Chapter
The focus for this chapter is soil, and the activities investigate the general soil characteristics of color, structure, and texture. Students learn that an examination of the soil can tell much about the area under investigation. Learning about soil...
Book Chapter
This chapter explores the concepts of energy and nutrients and goes back to the fundamental connection of these concepts with the environment. Activities are provided that help students design their own experiments to explore simple, but important, c...
Book Chapter
Biodiversity can be defined as the variation of taxonomic life forms within a given ecosystem or biome, or for the entire Earth. It can be used as a measure of the health of an ecosystem, to indicate what has existed from past to present, and to use...