This list of children's books recommends nonfiction titles that supplement basic information found in lessons and activities of this themed issue of the online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle. The books are grouped by topic -- water, weather and climate, and atmosphere. Each book is described by its content, reading level, and possible uses in the classroom. Covers are pictured. The online magazine is produced for elementary school teachers and is structured around the essential principles of climate sciences and climate literacy.

In this activity, students will learn the concept of half-life of a radioactive material. Students will create and be able to recognize a graph representing the half-life of an imaginary radioactive element.

This free, standards-based website developed for elementary teachers provides hand-picked, reviewed, on-line resources to enhance teacher content knowledge regarding reasons for the seasons.

This video segment presents a variety of sounds -- from animals to machines to musical instruments -- while introducing the basic concepts of vibration, volume, and pitch.

This inteactive lecture and series of demonstrations develops the concepts and vocabulary of oscillatory motion as it relates to the motion of a mass on a spring.

This series of questions before instruction, in-class peer instruction as students come to understanding, and visualization of an important mathematical relationship allow students to iterate and improve their understanding of work incrementally.

Four unit plans provide opportunities for in-depth explorations of important foundational climate concepts -- weather, water as a solid, liquid and gas, and the water cycle -- that are appropriate for K-2 and 3-5 learners. These unit plans incorporate many of the lessons highlighted in other articles in this issue of the online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle. The magazine is structured around the essential principles of the climate sciences.

In this article, teachers find two unit plans (grades K-2 and 3-5) that use resources featured in the science and literacy articles in the magazine. The unit plans are modeled after the five key steps in the learning cycle: engage, explore, explain, expand, and assess, or evaluate. The plans are aligned with the science content standards of the National Science Education Standards and the English language arts standards of the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association. The plans appear in the free, online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle.

Excellent and comprehensive site created by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. The site has resources about and links to information on a large number of topics in biophysics.

A page from the University of Maryland Physics Lecture Demonstration Facility. Provides directions for a teacher demonstration of the ideal gas law. Shows apparatus and set-up; provides suggestions. Easily adaptable as a student project or lab investigation.

This article highlights activities for elementary students that model icebergs and develop an informal understanding of the concepts of buoyancy and density. Suggestions for inquiry-based activities are included.

Undergraduate Learning Assistants can be used to supplement the instructor and/or Teaching Assistant during recitations. They may help facilitate productive group work on tutorial activities designed to help students develop conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills. In this example, we describe the use of Learning Assistants to support tutorials within recitation in two introductory science courses physics and chemistry.

Learning Assistants are used to facilitate student discussion in peer instruction during clicker questions (i.e., classroom response systems), by asking Socratic questions, emphasizing reasoning, and probing student thinking.

This activity is a computer lab activity in which students use Microsoft Excel to create a spreadsheet capable of calculating gravity forces and acceleration values for any two objects if the masses of the objects and their separation distance are entered. Students will use their calculators to analyze numerous object pairs and make conclusions about gravity forces and accelerations on earth, on other planets, and in space.

This activity provides a complete curriculum for teaching the photoelectric effect using the PhET Photoelectric Effect simulation in a large-lecture modern physics course. It includes links to powerpoint slides for two to three 50-minute lectures using Peer Instruction with clickers, and one homework assignment suitable for an online homework system. Research has demonstrated that students in classes using this curriculum have a better understanding of the photoelectric effect than students in classes using traditional instruction supplemented by a computerized tutor.

Labs and tutorials that use equipment such as circuits can be modified to use PhET simulations instead. Research shows that substituting the PhET Circuit Construction Kit simulation for real equipment in a variety of contexts leads to improved conceptual learning in the best cases, and the same conceptual learning in the worst cases. There are many advantages to using PhET simulations over real equipment: They are easy to use, so students can play around and modify the experiment quickly and easily without fear of breaking the equipment. They have productive constraints to focus attention on the most important aspects of the experiment (e.g. bulb brightness and current flow) rather than on irrelevant aspects (e.g. wire color and length). Finally, if real equipment is not available, PhET simulations provide the opportunity to do multiple experiments with a single piece of equipment: a computer.

These labs provide examples of using very open-ended questions to guide students in exploring a simulation and designing their own experiments. These labs can lead to a high level of quantitative thinking about data analysis.

How can you pick up an ice cube with a string? Watch this video segment adapted from ZOOM to see how salt can help.

This activity is for an introductory oceanography course. It is designed to allow students to use various tools (satellite images, Google Earth) to explore the shape of the sea floor and ocean basins in order to gain a better understanding of both the processes that form ocean basins, as well as how the shape of ocean basins influences physical and biological processes.

In this activity, students interpret the motion of a car using its related velocity and acceleration vectors.