All of us have felt sick at some point in our lives. Many times, we find ourselves asking, "What is the quickest way that I can start to feel better?" During this two-lesson unit, students study that question and determine which form of medicine delivery (pill, liquid, injection/shot) offers the fastest relief. This challenge question serves as a real-world context for learning all about flow rates. Students study how long various prescription methods take to introduce chemicals into our blood streams, as well as use flow rate to determine how increasing a person's heart rate can theoretically make medicines work more quickly. Students are introduced to engineering devices that simulate what occurs during the distribution of antibiotic cells in the body.

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.

This video segment from the teacher video series Learning That Works uses a case study to highlight the effectiveness of a project-based, real-world approach to teaching science.

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 Evolution video segment depicts the landmark hominid fossil finds by Don Johanson and his team in Ethiopia.

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.

In this video segment from Evolution: "Great Transformations," paleontologist Jenny Clack explains that vertebrates evolved fingers before they invaded land.

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.

This video segment from NatureScene features the area of the Congaree Swamp where the high ground and the flood plain meet. Learn how a few feet of difference in elevation on a floodplain can yield drastic changes in what youŰ__Ű__ŒŒÇll find living there.

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.

How does energy move around an ecosystem? Students will be able to visually represent how moves through an ecosystem and predict how changes to one part of a food web will impact other populations.

This article provides science content knowledge about forces that shape the Earth's surface: erosion by wind, water, and ice, volcanoes, earthquakes, and plate tectonics and how these forces affect Earth's polar regions.

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.

Watching plants grow is like watching paint dry: It happens so slowly that the changes are imperceptible from one moment to the next -- and yet the end results are dramatic. This video segment shows just how amazing plant development can be by depicting various phases of the process using time-lapse photography. Footage from NOVA: "The Shape of Things."