The Earth

Draw a picture of the layers of the earth and label them. Share pictures with the class.

Write about your favorite season and explain why. Describe the changes that come about in nature and the activities you like to do because of those changes.

Research and write a paper explaining the changes that happen in nature when the seasons change.

Using a map, count the number of continents and oceans there are on the earth. Make a graph about what you found.

As a class make a large model of the interior layers of the earth to scale. Use this diagram to help.

Using this diagram of the layers of the earth, calculate the distance of each of the earth's layers. Find another site to help translate each layer from km to miles.

Using the graphs on this US Geological Survey website, determine the fractions represented in the diagram.

Things that people do can affect the world around them. People can reduce their effects on the land, water, air, and other living things.

Living things need water, air, and resources from the land. They live in places that have the things they need. Humans use natural resources for everything they do.

Sunlight warms Earth's surface. Examples of Earth's surface could include sand, soil, rocks, and water.

Seasonal patterns of sunrise and sunset can be observed, described, and predicted. Seasons are created by weather patterns for a particular region and time.

Emphasis is on relative comparisons of the amount of daylight in the winter to the amount in the spring or fall.

Wind and water can change the shape of the land.

Because there is always more than one possible solution to a problem, it is useful to compare and test designs.

Examples of solutions could include different designs of dikes and windbreaks to hold back wind and water, and different designs for using shrubs, grass, and trees to hold back the land.

Water is found in the ocean, rivers, lakes, and ponds. Water exists as solid ice and in liquid form.

Maps show where things are located. One can map the land and water in any area.

Some Earth events happen very quickly; others occur very slowly, over a time period much longer than one can observe.

Examples of events and timescales could include volcanic explosions and earthquakes, which happen quickly, and erosion of rocks, which occurs slowly.

Climate describes a range of an area's typical weather conditions and the extent to which those conditions vary over the years.

A variety of hazards result from natural processes (e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions). Hazards can not be eliminated, but their impacts can be reduced.

Examples of solutions could include designing an earthquake resistant building and improving monitoring of volcanic activity. Testing a solution involves investigating how well it performs under a range of likely conditions.

Energy and fuels that humans use are derived from natural Earth sources, and their use affects the environment in multiple ways. Some energy resources are renewable over time, and others are not.

Examples of renewable energy could include wind and water energy; non-renewable energy resources include fossil fuels. Examples of environmental effects could include erosion due to deforestation, loss of habitat due to dams and mining, and air pollution from burning fossil fuels.

The locations of mountain ranges, ocean trenches, earthquakes, and volcanoes occur in patterns. Most earthquakes and volcanoes occur in bands that are often along the boundaries between continents and oceans. Major mountain chains form inside continents or near their edges. Maps can help locate the different land and water feature areas of Earth.

Maps can include topographic maps of Earth's land and ocean floor, as well as maps of the locations of mountains, continental boundaries, volcanoes, and earthquakes.

Rainfall helps to shape the land and affects the types of living things found in a region. Water, ice, wind, living organisms, and gravity break rocks, soils, and sediments into smaller particles and move them around.

Examples of variables to test could include angle of slope in the downhill movement of water, amount of vegetation, relative rate of deposition, cycles of freezing and thawing of water, cycles of heating and cooling, and volume of water flow.

Local, regional, and global patterns of rock formations reveal changes over time due to earth forces, such as earthquakes. The presence and location of certain fossil types indicate the order in which rock layers were formed.

Examples of evidence from patterns could include rock layers with marine shell fossils above rock layers with plant fossils and no shells, indicating a change from land to water over time; and a canyon with different rock layers in the walls and a river in the bottom, indicating that over time a river cut through the rock.

Human activities in agriculture, industry, and everyday life have effects on the land, vegetation, rivers, oceans, air, and even outer space. Individuals and communities can often mitigate these effects through innovation and technology.

Nearly all of Earth's available water is in the ocean. Most fresh water is in glaciers or underground; only a tiny fraction is in streams, lakes, wetlands, and the atmosphere.

Earth's major systems are the geosphere (solid and molten rock, soil, and sediments), the hydrosphere (water and ice), the atmosphere (air), and the biosphere (living things, including humans). These systems interact in multiple ways to affect Earth's surface materials and processes.

Examples could include the influence of the ocean on ecosystems, landform shape, and climate; the influence of the atmosphere on landforms and ecosystems; and the influence of mountain ranges on winds and clouds in the atmosphere.

The orbits of Earth around the sun and of the moon around Earth, together with the rotation of Earth about an axis between its North and South poles, cause observable patterns. These include day and night; daily changes in the length and direction of shadows; and different positions of the sun, moon, and stars at different times of the day, month, and year.

The gravitational force of Earth acting on an object near Earth's surface pulls that object toward the planet's center.

Technology and engineering can potentially help us best manage natural resources as populations increase.

Examples of evidence include grade-appropriate databases on human populations and the rates of consumption of food and natural resources (such as freshwater, mineral, and energy). Examples of effects can include changes made to the appearance, composition, and structure of Earth’s systems as well as the rates at which they change.

Human activities can positively and negatively influence the biosphere, sometimes altering natural habitats and ecosystems.

Examples of the design process include examining human interactions and designing feasible solutions that promote stewardship. Examples can include water usage (such as stream and river use, aquifer recharge, or dams and levee construction); land usage (such as urban development, agriculture, wetland benefits, stream reclamation, or fire restoration); and pollution (such as of the air, water, or land).

Emphasis is on how some natural hazards, such as volcanic eruptions and severe weather, are preceded by phenomena that allow for reliable predictions. Others, such as earthquakes, occur suddenly, and are not yet predictable. Examples of natural hazards can be taken from interior processes (such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions), surface processes (such as mass wasting and tsunamis), or severe weather events (such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods). Examples of data can include the locations, magnitudes, and frequencies of the natural hazards. Examples of mitigation strategies can be global (such as satellite systems to monitor hurricanes or forest fires) or local (such as building basements in tornado-prone regions or reservoirs to mitigate droughts).

Humans depend on Earth's land, ocean, atmosphere, and biosphere for many different resources.

Examples of uneven distributions of resources as a result of past processes include petroleum {locations of the burial of organic sediments and subsequent geologic traps), metal ores {locations of past volcanic and hydrothermal activity associated with subduction zones), and soil (locations of active weathering and/or deposition of rock).

Weather and climate are influenced by interactions involving sunlight, the ocean, the atmosphere, ice, landforms, and living things. These interactions vary with latitude, altitude, and local and regional geography, all of which can affect oceanic and atmospheric flow patterns.

The complex patterns of the changes and the movement of water in the atmosphere, determined by winds, landforms, and ocean temperatures and currents, are major determinants of local weather patterns.

Because these patterns are so complex, weather can only be predicted using probability.

Water continually cycles among land, ocean, and atmosphere via transpiration, evaporation, condensation and crystallization, and precipitation, as well as downhill flows on land.

Global movements of water and its changes in form are propelled by sunlight and gravity.

Emphasis is on the ways water changes its state as it moves through the multiple pathways of the hydrologic cycle.

Tectonic processes continually generate new ocean sea floor at ridges and destroy old sea floor at trenches.

Maps of ancient land and water patterns, based on investigations of rocks and fossils, make clear how Earth's plates have moved great distances, collided, and spread apart.

Examples of data include similarities of rock and fossil types on different continents, the shapes of the continents, and the locations of ocean structures.

The planet's systems interact over scales that range from microscopic to global in size, and they operate over fractions of a second to billions of years. These interactions have shaped Earth's history and will determine its future.

Water's movements—both on the land and underground – cause weathering and erosion, which change the land's surface features and create underground formations.

Emphasis is on how processes change Earth's surface at time and spatial scales that can be large (such as slow plate motions or the uplift of mountain ranges), or small (such as rapid landslides or microscopic geochemical reactions), and how geoscience processes (such as earthquakes and volcanoes) usually behave gradually but are punctuated by catastrophic events.

All Earth processes are the result of energy flowing and matter cycling within and among the planet's system. This energy is derived from the sun and Earth's hot interior. Emphasis is on the processes of melting, crystallization, weathering, deformation, and sedimentation, which act together to form minerals and rocks through the cycling of Earth's materials.

The geologic time scale interpreted from rock strata provides a way to organize Earth's history.

Emphasis is on how analyses of rock formations and the fossils they contain are used to establish relative ages of major events in Earth's history. Examples of Earth's major events could range from being very recent (such as the last Ice Age) to very old (such as the formation of the Earth or the earliest evidence of life.) Examples can include the formation of mountain chains and ocean basins, the evolution or extinction of organisms, or large volcanic eruptions.

Patterns of the apparent motion of the sun and the moon can be observed, described, predicted, and explained with models.

This model of the solar system can explain eclipses of the sun and the moon. Earth's spin axis is fixed in direction over the short-term but tilted relative to its orbit around the sun. The seasons are a result of that tilt and are caused by the differential intensity of sunlight on different areas of Earth across the year.

Emphasis is on finding patterns of changes in the level of complexity of the anatomical structures in organisms and the chronological order of fossil appearance in the rock layers.