"This toolkit includes a set of 6 facilitation guides for small-group SEL activities—complete with “how to” instructions and differentiation tips for educators. These low-lift strategies are designed to help promote positive relationships while building students’ SEL skills."

Body Scan
Positive Pivot
Rose, Bud, Thorn
Two-Word Check-In
Lunch Bunch
WOOP

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Based on their locations, many water and wastewater utilities face an inherent risk of flooding. Here’s how a small drinking water utility recognized its risk and took steps to reduce it.

Video on How to Screencast- Using the Smart Recorder
Video on Using Smart Tool Recorder

Students become familiar with the concept of a communication system, its various parts and functions. To do this, they encode, decode, transmit, receive and store messages for a hypothetical rescue mission, using a code sheet and flashlight for this process.They also maintain storage sheets from which they can retrieve information as it is required.

This site explores the world of using science. Watch and learn some new things today.

smARThistory.org is a free multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional and static art history textbook.

WARNING Graphic Content: The videos and images below contain graphic documentation of real life, rotting human and animal corpses that may be disturbing to a younger audience.

A forensic scientist enters a crime scene and sees some flies, maggots, and a few beetles on and around a dead body. She immediately begins collecting them. Why? Because these insects can help investigators solve crimes!
The type and ages of insects found at a crime scene can help investigators determine how long a body has been lying there, for instance, and if the victim had taken any drugs, medications, or poison before death.
Our understanding of the clues that insects can provide about a crime scene comes from research done at facilities called body farms. At these facilities, forensic scientists study how bodies decompose, and forensic entomologists study the insects that contribute to that decomposition.
In this activity, you will create your own mini-body farm to attract insects to a “corpse” (in this case, a piece of meat). Over the course of a week, you will observe the number and types of insects that arrive at your corpse. You’ll use that data to explore how crime scene conditions affect the decomposition of a corpse.

Smiling Mind can be used with kids, teachers or parents - at school and at home!

"Smiling Mind is a non-for-profit web and app-based meditation program developed by psychologists and educators to help bring mindfulness into your life."

To use these mediation, you can use the website, or download the free app from the App Store or Google Play.

There are full programs for classrooms, specifically for teachers, kids as well as adults.

No need to travel to one of the Smithsonian’s zoos or museums — this website brings your child everything from live video of the National Zoo to the Smithsonian Learning Lab right to their screen

This site invites kids to start a collection of rocks, shells, postcards, posters, or something else that interests them. Three Smithsonian collections are sampled. Rocks and Minerals includes the Hope Diamond; Stamps includes Western Cattle in Storm (1898); Historic Coins includes the Jefferson Indian Peace Medal.

This educational website hosted by the Smithsonian Museum takes a deep dive into ocean life.

Students develop a persuasive peer-to-peer case against smoking, with the goal to understand how language usage can influence perception, attitudes and behavior.

The purpose of this task is to give students experience modeling a real-world example of exponential growth, in a context that provides a vivid illustration of the power of exponential growth, for example the cost of inaction for a year.

Available for both iOS and Android: (copy and paste url into your device browser)
- Apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/snapseed/id439438619
- Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.niksoftware.snapseed&hl=en_CA&gl=US

Snapseed is a free photo-editing app where you can take photos in the app and edit them, or edit photos already in your camera roll.. It includes a large number of preset filters to apply to your photos, but there are also 29 tools you can use to apply precise and fine-tuned effects, such as tune, curves, crop, brush, perspective, HDR scape, vintage, retro lux, portrait, lens blur, frames, vignette, text, and more. You can also save a combination of edits as a particular "look" that you can then easily apply in one tap to other photos.

There are built-in tutorials that quickly show you how to achieve certain looks, from vignettes to vintage postcards. Each one is very short, listing the tools that are used in the tutorial, then going through what you need to do with step-by-step visual examples.

One particularly handy aspect of Snapseed is how easy it is to undo and revise work. At any time, you can undo or change any edits made so far, allowing you to access each edit separately. Then, once you're done with your image, you can share it, open it in another app, export it (creating a copy with permanent changes), or save it, which saves the image along with its edits that you can still undo/change in the future.

For this maker challenge, students decide on specific design requirements (such as good traction or deep cushioning), sketch their plans, and then use a variety of materials to build prototype shoes that meet the design criteria. The bottoms (soles) of sneakers provide support, cushioning, flexibility and traction as makes sense for the sport or activity. In addition, some sneakers are intended to be fashionable with cool colors, materials or added height. Sneakers are engineered products that use a mix of materials to create highly functional, useful shoes.

Students explore why different types of sneakers are used in a variety of common sports, and how engineers analyze design needs in sneakers and many other everyday items. The goal is for students to understand the basics of engineering associated with the design of athletic shoes. The design of footware based on how it will be used involves bioengineering. Students analyze the foot movements in a variety of sports, develop design criteria for a specific sport, and make recommendations for requirements for the sneakers used in that sport.

For this project, I began by creating a web about "Snow" and where I thought the topic could lead to with the students. Next I started a "Snow" web with the students and had them tell me all that they knew about snow. After that we came up with some questions about snow and what we wanted to learn. From there, I provided some invitations for the students in the classroom to explore and learn from.

This resource evolves from there; from discussing what we can do to stay warm in winter, learning poems and songs, reading books, doing gross and fine motor activities before finally building an igloo.

Engineers work in many fields associated with precipitation. Engineers study glaciers to better understand their dates of formation and current demise. They deal with issues of pollution transport and water yield, and they monitor reservoirs and dams to prevent flooding.

Students review what they know about the 20 major bones in the human body (names, shapes, functions, locations, as learned in the associated lesson) and the concept of density (mass per unit of volume). Then student pairs calculate the densities for different bones from a disarticulated human skeleton model of fabricated bones, making measurements via triple-beam balance (for mass) and water displacement (for volume). All groups share their results with the class in order to collectively determine the densities for every major bone in the body. This activity prepares students for the next activity, "Can It Support You? No Bones about It," during which they act as biomedical engineers and design artificial bones, which requires them to find materials of suitable density to perform as human body implants.

Students learn about the properties of solutions—such as ion interactions, surface tension and viscosity—as they make their own soap and shampoo and then compare their properties. Working as if they are chemical engineers, they explore and compare how the two surfactants behave in tap water, as well as classroom-prepared acidic water, hard water and seawater using four tests: a “shake test” (assessing the amount of bubbles produced), a surface tension test, a viscosity test, and a pH test. Then they coalesce their findings into a recommendation for how to engineer the best soap versus shampoo. The activity may be shortened by using purchased liquid soap and shampoo from which students proceed to conduct the four tests. A lab worksheet and post-quiz are provided.