Rocks, soil and water
Rocks and minerals, soil, erosion and the water cycle.
Lessons
Climate Clues
Tree rings, old weather records and what your own town's numbers say. Three lessons on how scientists tell climate apart from a cold week.
Our Living Planet
Air, water, land and living things, and how each one depends on the others. Students build a sealed jar ecosystem to keep for a month and catch the water cycle in a bag on the window.
Rocks and Erosion: How Land Changes Shape
Why some rocks scratch and some fizz, how a trickle of water carves a canyon, what keeps a hillside in place, and how a boulder ends up as sand. Four hands-on lessons on rocks, weathering and erosion.
Restless Earth: Fossils, Soils, Volcanoes and Plates
Press model fossils and read a cliff of layers, shake a jar of soil and watch it sort itself by grain size, plot real volcanoes and earthquakes on a world map to find the edges of Earth's plates, then move model plates and test a building on a shake table. Four hands-on lessons that build on Rocks and Erosion.
The Water Cycle, Start to Finish
A water-drop journey game around eight stations of the room, a 100-square model of where all of Earth's water really is, from USGS data, and a sealed bag of water on a sunny window that shows the Sun driving the whole cycle. Two of the three lessons need nothing but printed sheets.
Survival Clues: Fossils, Groups and Changing Habitats
Four no-materials lessons on what helps living things survive: reading fossil cards from Antarctica to the Himalaya to work out what places were like long ago, a predator-and-prey game on why animals live in groups, a camouflage hunt on printed bark and sand, and case files on what happens when a habitat changes. Everything runs on printed sheets.
Living with Water: Salt, Rice and the Mekong
Science and English together, for English learners (CEFR A2–B1). Three investigations from Vietnam: how salt farmers turn the sea into salt, how rice terraces stop a mountain washing away, and how a house in the Mekong Delta stays dry in the flood season.
Online practice
- Soil and rock Senior Infants
- Rock properties Senior Infants
- Soil and plant growth Second Class
- What causes erosion Second Class
- Erosion steps Second Class
- Water and rock Second Class
- Soil and rock layers Second Class
- Types of soil Second Class
- Soil holds water Second Class
- Compare soil test results Second Class
- Water cycle steps Second Class
- Rocks break down Second Class
- Fossils and past environments Third Class
- Adaptations, groups and survival Third Class
- Habitats and when they change Third Class
- Weathering and erosion Fourth Class
- Rock layers and fossils Fourth Class
- Earth’s water and the water cycle Fifth Class
Free tools
Water Cycle
Turn up the sun and watch water evaporate, condense into clouds and fall as rain or snow, then follow one drop of water on its journey.
Rock Cycle
Melt, cool, weather, squeeze and heat rocks to see how igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rock turn into each other, with real examples of each.