Archive for the Category ◊ Earth Sciences ◊
This nice Flash animation about food chains will enhance your ecology lessons. At first, the student is presented with information about energy, producers and consumers. Then the student can complete three food chains: one for woodland, another for a river and finally one for seashore. The animation is offered for free by Crickweb from the UK.
Did you know that many volcanoes have webcams capturing their activity 24 hours a day, every single day? If you are studying volcanoes with your students, they might find very interesting to watch some live shot of volcanoes on the surface of the earth. It may even me more amazing if you can a volcano on a webcam while it is active. Here is a list of websites where you can catch their activity on-line :
Groundwork Exploration is an exploration website provided by Science North, a science center is Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. There is a case study where students will learn more about the discovery of nickel and copper riches at Voisey’s Bay, Newfoundland. A quiz also let students test their knowledge about Canada’s mining industry. Texts are in a language that is easy to read and understand by most elementary school students. The main feature is the exploration portion of the website. In this part, students are invited to join the cartoon character to explore for gold, copper or diamonds on a “virtual property”! They learn to be an exploration geologist, to piece together the clues to help pinpoint the ideal drilling site. The site is available in both English and French.
David Jegou owns a major collection of minerals. He has taken over 100 pictures with descriptions of all the specimens in his collection and included all of them on the website. The collection is composed of commons species as well as unusual species. The gallery is organized in four sections: French specimens, Spanish specimens, Korean specimens and everything else. It includes specimens such as barite, calcite, dolomite, fluorite, gypsum, molybdenite, pyrite, quartz, topaz and tourmaline. David Jegou states clearly that the pictures are copyrighted and may not be reproduced by anyone without obtaining permission. However, the website is great for students to browse through the pictures.
Volcano World is a Collaborative Higher Education, K-12, and Public Outreach project of the North Dakota and Oregon Space Grant Consortia administered by the Department of Geosciences at Oregon State University. It presents news and information about volcanoes in the world with pictures and links. Right now, the East Java’s Mud Volcano in Indonesia is featured on the main page. There are also pictures of Canary Island volcanic features. It also includes some sample project of volcano building in classrooms with some ideas on how to build a good volcano. There are also pictures from the space showing volcanoes on other planets. It is a link to add to your bookmarks if you are teaching earth science and volcanic eruptions.
