The+Earth's+Atmosphere

Rachael Hugehs 7th/8th grade science teacher Meadow Community School Mapleton Public School District rachael.hughesr@gmail.com
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The Earth's Atmosphere:

All this technology can be overwhelming, especially for teachers like me who are trying to stay with the times. But you can still include STEM and 21st century skills in other ways. Her is a way that I updated one my lessons this year.

Old Lesson ﻿ : Students would read about the atmosphere layers through a complicated piece of text. Then they would graph and then they should know what they are and why they are there. Sound Familiar. Well every year I tried to rework this lesson because the student had such a hard time comprehending the reading that they lost the value in the data. [|Layers_of_Atmosphere.pdf]

Revised Lesson: This time, students were given only given temperatue data and asked to graph it. The students made observations about trends they noticed and overall observations. It was amazing, because almost every student determined that there needs to be four different sections of the atmosphere. This led them to explore what else was different in the atmosphere. The discovery was theirs and not constructed.