Students will learn about issues concerning soil and water and how farmers use science to help conserve these resources.

Crash Course Kids combines the same engaging lecture-style content delivery with animated graphics that focus on grade school science.

Topics include Earth Science, Physical Science, Biology, Geography, Engineering, and Astronomy.

These videos are amazing!

Students learn how the force of water helps determine the size and shape of dams. They use clay to build models of four types of dams, and observe the force of the water against each type. They conclude by deciding which type of dam they, as Splash Engineering engineers, will design for Thirsty County.

While the creation of a dam provides many benefits, it can have negative impacts on local ecosystems. Students learn about the major environmental impacts of dams and the engineering solutions used to address them.

Through eight lessons, students are introduced to many facets of dams, including their basic components, the common types (all designed to resist strong forces), their primary benefits (electricity generation, water supply, flood control, irrigation, recreation), and their importance (historically, currently and globally). Through an introduction to kinetic and potential energy, students come to understand how dams generate electricity. They learn about the structure, function and purpose of locks, which involves an introduction to Pascal's law, water pressure and gravity. Other lessons introduce students to common environmental impacts of dams and the engineering approaches to address them. They learn about the life cycle of salmon and the many engineered dam structures that aid in their river passage, as they think of their own methods and devices that could help fish migrate past dams. Students learn how dams and reservoirs become part of the Earth's hydrologic cycle, focusing on the role of evaporation. To conclude, students learn that dams do not last forever; they require ongoing maintenance, occasionally fail or succumb to "old age," or are no longer needed, and are sometimes removed. Through associated hands-on activities, students track their personal water usage; use clay and plastic containers to model and test four types of dam structures; use paper cups and water to learn about water pressure and Pascal's Law; explore kinetic energy by creating their own experimental waterwheel from two-liter plastic bottles; collect and count a stream's insects to gauge its health; play an animated PowerPoint game to quiz their understanding of the salmon life cycle and fish ladders; run a weeklong experiment to measure water evaporation and graph their data; and research eight dams to find out and compare their original purposes, current status, reservoir capacity and lifespan. Woven throughout the unit is a continuing hypothetical scenario in which students act as consulting engineers with a Splash Engineering firm, assisting Thirsty County in designing a dam for Birdseye River.

In this first part of a two-part lab activity, students use triple balance beams and graduated cylinders to take measurements and calculate the densities of several common, irregularly shaped objects with the purpose to resolve confusion about mass and density. After this activity, conduct the associated Density Column Lab - Part 2 activity before presenting the associated Density & Miscibility lesson for discussion about concepts that explain what students have observed.

Concluding a two-part lab activity, students use triple balance beams and graduated cylinders to take measurements and calculate densities of several household liquids and compare them to the densities of irregularly shaped objects (as determined in Part 1). Then they create density columns with the three liquids and four solid items to test their calculations and predictions of the different densities. Once their density columns are complete, students determine the effect of adding detergent to the columns. After this activity, present the associated Density & Miscibility lesson for a discussion about why the column layers do not mix.

After students conduct the two associated activities, Density Column Lab - Parts 1 and 2, present this lesson to provide them with an understanding of why the density column's oil, water and syrup layers do not mix and how the concepts of density and miscibility relate to water chemistry and remediation. Topics covered include miscibility, immiscibility, hydrogen bonds, hydrophobic and hydrophilic. Through the density column lab activities, students see liquids and solids of different densities interact without an understanding of why the resulting layers do not mix. This lesson gives students insight on some of the most fundamental chemical properties of water and how it interacts with different molecules.

Let's continue the exploration of the Water Cycle by drinking some dinosaur pee. Yep! Well, it's a little less gross that it sounds. It turns out that all of the water on Earth is just constantly recycled in what we call a closed system. No water comes in and no water goes out. So that means that, at some point, it's possible the water we're drinking was once dinosaur pee... or tears...

In this activity, students investigate different methods (aeration and filtering) for removing pollutants from water. They will design and build their own water filters.

Students gain a basic understanding of the properties of media soil, sand, compost, gravel and how these materials affect the movement of water (infiltration/percolation) into and below the surface of the ground. They learn about permeability, porosity, particle size, surface area, capillary action, storage capacity and field capacity, and how the characteristics of the materials that compose the media layer ultimately affect the recharging of groundwater tables. They test each type of material, determining storage capacity, field capacity and infiltration rates, seeing the effect of media size on infiltration rate and storage. Then teams apply the testing results to the design their own material mixes that best meet the design requirements. To conclude, they talk about how engineers apply what students learned in the activity about the infiltration rates of different soil materials to the design of stormwater management systems.

The Healthy Kids Quest is a flexible program designed for grade 1 to 3 classes across the country. The program includes activity sheets and instructions on six themes, which have been split into sections to facilitate download.

Healthy Kids Quest introduction Includes an overview of the Healthy Kids Quest for teachers and group leaders, and the introduction documents to be sent home to parents/guardians

Program Kick-Off: Being Healthy Includes activities to help students understand how eating nutritious food and being physically active contribute to being healthy.

Topics Covered:
Water
Fruits and Vegetables
Whole Grains
Healthy Snacks
A Balanced Lunch Box
Physical Activity

Students see how surface tension can enable light objects (paper clips, peppercorns) to float on an island of oil in water, and subsequently sink when the surface tension of the oil/water interface is reduced by the addition of a surfactant; such as ordinary dish soap.

In the growing season, farmers and ranchers keep a watchful eye for any sign of drought. Early warning information can increase their range of options for dealing with the lack of water.

quarter of the global fish stocks are regarded as overfished, half of these been exploited to the limits of their capacity. Overfishing occurs when more fish are continuously being caught than naturally proliferate. Scientists fear that many stocks will collapse if the politics and management of fisheries do not change drastically. This means that fisheries activities must be coordinated internationally and that fish as a resource must be handled sustainably by law. From an economic perspective, overfishing is a problem which has developed because fish stocks are a common resource. A fish in the sea belongs to everyone; a caught fish belongs only to the fisherman.

The online game ecoOcean addresses this issue and shows that large catches do not necessarily bring the best results. In ecoOcean the players become fishermen and have to develop the best possible strategy for sustainable fishing.

The Idea
The online game ecoOcean was designed in association with the Cluster of Excellence “The Future Ocean” at Kiel University from the research of the “Sustainable Fisheries” work group.

In “The Future Ocean”, economists, lawyers, fishery biologists, oceanographers and geologists work together on developing new approaches and models for the realisation of a sustainable fisheries management concept.

Students are briefly introduced to Maxwell's equations and their significance to phenomena associated with electricity and magnetism. Basic concepts such as current, electricity and field lines are covered and reinforced. Through multiple topics and activities, students see how electricity and magnetism are interrelated.

Lesson plans for teachers on a variety of environmental science issues including
-food access
-oil sands
-access to uranium
-community mapping
-solar energy
-home heating
-weather and climate
-climate change
-water shed
-water conservation
-compost
-garbage

Les océans de la Terre et le cycle interconnecté de l'eau et des cours d'eau sont essentiels à tous les organismes vivants de la Terre. Pourtant, la santé de ces océans et, par le fait même, le bien-être de toutes les formes de vie sur Terre, est en grande partie menacée par les impacts de l'activité humaine. Le plastique est omniprésent dans nos océans et il va falloir une transformation profonde de la conscience et des activités de l'humanité concernant les océans pour assurer une vie saine et durable sur cette planète

Nous croyons que c'est possible! Mais nous avons besoin de votre aide. Nos jeunes doivent être sensibilisés à leur propre utilisation du plastique et à l'impact direct de leurs actions sur l'environnement qui les entoure. Grâce à ces ressources, nous espérons que les jeunes deviendront des leaders du changement - et tout cela commence dans votre salle de classe.

Disponible aux niveaux maternelle, primaire et secondaire, et pour éducateurs francophones et anglophones.

Boîte à outils pour enseignants
Liens vers les normes d’apprentissage prescrites par province
Plan unitaire pour enseignants
Cahier d’exercices pour les étudiants

In this unit, students explore the various roles of environmental engineers, including: environmental cleanup, water quality, groundwater resources, surface water and groundwater flow, water contamination, waste disposal and air pollution. Specifically, students learn about the factors that affect water quality and the conditions that enable different animals and plants to survive in their environments. Next, students learn about groundwater and how environmental engineers study groundwater to predict the distribution of surface pollution. Students also learn how water flows through the ground, what an aquifer is and what soil properties are used to predict groundwater flow. Additionally, students discover that the water they drink everyday comes from many different sources, including surface water and groundwater. They investigate possible scenarios of drinking water contamination and how contaminants can negatively affect the organisms that come in contact with them. Students learn about the three most common methods of waste disposal and how environmental engineers continue to develop technologies to dispose of trash. Lastly, students learn what causes air pollution and how to investigate the different pollutants that exist, such as toxic gases and particulate matter. Also, they investigate the technologies developed by engineers to reduce air pollution.

Students are introduced to the fundamentals of environmental engineering as well as the global air, land and water quality concerns facing today's environmental engineers. After a lesson and activity to introduce environmental engineering, students learn more about water chemistry aspects of environmental engineering. Specifically, they focus on groundwater contamination and remediation, including sources of contamination, adverse health effects of contaminated drinking water, and current and new remediation techniques. Several lab activities provide hands-on experiences with topics relevant to environmental engineering concerns and technologies, including removal efficiencies of activated carbon in water filtration, measuring pH, chromatography as a physical separation method, density and miscibility.