Classroom Resources

Students will combine a study of facts regarding tobacco with a survey of their peers' attitudes and experiences to create a schoolwide smoking prevention campaign. The objective is to understand facts about smoking and use those facts to impact the entire school population.

The narrator discusses child labor and progressive reformers who fought to put an end to child labor. 

In this YouTube video, students will be introduced to George Washington Carver, an Alabamian who made contributions in the fields of science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. George Washington Carver sure was one brilliant guy! He overcame many of the obstacles that he faced to develop many inventions, including hundreds of uses for peanuts.

This clip from the Smithsonian Channel discusses the Trail of Tears and how it got its name. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 resulted in the forced relocation of over 15,000 Cherokee people--a third of whom died during the journey to Oklahoma.

Karl Marx grew from philosopher and economist to social activist as co-author of "The Communist Manifesto." Learn more about the reach and influence of his theories in this video.

Xavier, Yandina, and Brad have a lively debate over who the best hero of all time is. They each have different ideas, but one thing they can all agree on is that whoever it is needs to have the most courage, which means they aren’t afraid of anything. Suddenly, whoosh – our trio find themselves in the Secret Museum! They’re sent back in time to meet someone who truly embodies what it means to be a hero: Harriet Tubman. Xavier, Yandina, and Brad follow along with Harriet as she bravely sneaks through the night as a young girl to see her family, despite her fear of being caught. They then watch in awe as an older Harriet bravely risks her own freedom so she can rescue others and lead them to freedom, too. Including her own parents. The answer to their question is suddenly clear: Harriet Tubman is one of the greatest heroes who ever lived, not because she wasn’t scared of anything, but because real courage is bravely moving forward even when you’re scared.

Xavier, Yadina, and Brad are surprised to see that the big new exhibit at the museum features an old bus. They’re unsure what’s so special about it but excited to climb aboard anyway. As our trio squabble over who will get to be the driver and honk the horn, they suddenly find themselves in the Secret Museum! Our heroes are sent back in time to meet the important person who once rode that bus: Rosa Parks. Witnessing how Rosa reacts to being treated unfairly, both as a young girl and as an adult when asked to give up her seat on that bus in 1955, opens our trio’s eyes to her very important message: everyone should be treated equally.

Xavier is at a loss for what to do: there are three pieces of pie left and one is way bigger than the other two. Who gets the big piece? This is a tough problem with only one solution…to the Secret Museum! Our heroes are sent back in time to meet someone who knew how to work out tough problems: Thurgood Marshall. Thurgood invites our trio back to his house, where he is about to feed his pets some carrot treats. But, uh oh, one carrot is way bigger than the others. Xavier, Yadina, and Brad have their own ideas for who should get the big carrot, but Thurgood decides to break apart the big carrot to ensure everyone gets an equal amount because he knows the most important thing is to be fair to everyone.

Yadina is excited when she’s chosen to be the leader of her Nature Troop, thinking this a great first step toward becoming President one day. The only problem is, she isn’t entirely sure how to be a good leader. To the Secret Museum! Our heroes are sent back in time to meet one of the greatest leaders in the history of the United States: George Washington. Yadina is awe-struck as she gets to meet her country’s very first president, who offers to take them on a fishing trip. As he leads them through the woods to the fishing hole, George is polite, helpful, and supportive, showing Yadina that a good leader takes care of his or her team.

Players take on the role of bilbies, rabbit-sized Australian marsupials, as they race through the landscape looking for food and avoiding predators—and trying not to run into rocks—in this interactive game from PLUM LANDING™. They also learn about the bilby’s life cycle and the plants and animals that share its ecosystem.

Players are challenged to complete a series of missions to photograph mountain plants and animals in the Canadian Rockies, in this interactive game from PLUM LANDING™. Through the clues that Plum provides, players learn about mountain ecosystems, the plants and animals living there, and how they are adapted to mountain life. 

Players are challenged to complete a series of missions to photograph rainforest plants and animals in Borneo, in this interactive game from PLUM LANDING™. Through the clues that Plum provides, players learn about rainforest ecosystems, the plants and animals living there, and how they are adapted to rainforest life. 

Players are challenged to complete a series of missions to photograph desert plants and animals in the Australian outback, in this interactive game from PLUM LANDING™. Through the clues that Plum provides, players learn about desert ecosystems, the plants and animals living there, and how they are adapted to desert life.

Explore how weather can change during snowstorms in this slideshow produced by WGBH. The images show the progression of snowstorms from a light flurry, to steady snow, to a blizzard, to conditions after a storm ends. Students can use the images in the slideshow to identify and describe the characteristics of each condition of the storm and compare conditions throughout the storm.

To view the Background Essay, Student Activity, Teaching Tips, and Non-Visual (NV) supports for this slideshow, go to Support Materials below. This resource was developed through WGBH’s Bringing the Universe to America’s Classrooms project, in collaboration with NASA. Click here for the full collection of resources.

In this interactive lesson, students explore how things are the same and how they are different as you compare and contrast information with videos and text (and a slimy snail!). Play recycling games, read secret ‘snail trail’ messages, and learn why we must reduce our landfills.

Players take on the role of baby groupers, fish whose young grow up in the shelter of mangrove roots, in this interactive game from PLUM LANDING™. Their goal is to swim into open water to find food like shrimp—without falling prey to hungry predators like sharks and herons.

Through the process of photosynthesis, plants harness the Sun's energy and in so doing make many forms of life—including human life—possible. What path does this energy follow, and how is it transferred from one type of organism to another? In this feature from NOVA: Earth, learn why 400 pounds of corn cannot be converted into a 400-pound cow.

Players are challenged to complete a series of missions to photograph coastal mangrove plants and animals in Belize, in this interactive game from PLUM LANDING™. Through the clues that Plum provides, players learn about coastal ecosystems, the plants and animals living there, and how they are adapted to coastal life. 

Dive in and explore the wet and wonderful world of our friends, the manatees. Practice reading and learning like a scientist reads and learns. Have fun comparing and contrasting text and visual media, and read some very happy news about manatees.

Explore real-life and animated views illustrating the daily patterns of motion of the Sun, Moon, and stars in the sky. Students engage with a variety of media such as an interactive storybook, time-lapse videos, and images to identify evidence of motion and predict future appearances of the Sun, Moon, and stars.

Observe how the Sun, Moon, and stars are visible in the sky at different times of the day and identify predictable patterns in the apparent motion of these objects with this WGBH lesson plan. Students record and analyze data to identify patterns that can be used to predict future appearances in the sky. This lesson plan includes media such as a slideshow, videos, interactive activities, and live-action video clips.

This resource was developed through WGBH’s Bringing the Universe to America’s Classrooms project, in collaboration with NASA.

Players identify and remove invasive species from ecosystems around the world, in this interactive game from PLUM LANDING™. They must act quickly before the invasive species use up all the resources.

Catch that fluff! Players explore the different ways that seeds are dispersed (as burrs in fur, consumed by birds or transported by mammals, floating on the wind or water, or spinning through the air), in this interactive game from PLUM LANDING™. Along the way, players learn about the plants in a mountain ecosystem, how their seeds travel, and how animals rely on them.

In this audio clip, students ask the question: Does air have weight? This is a great clip to engage students in a discussion on mass and density. 

Players are challenged to investigate a city neighborhood and explore relationships among living and non-living things in this interactive game from PLUM LANDING. Plum provides short prompts that encourage students to find animals and plants, consider how they meet their needs in a city environment, and discover connections among living and non-living things.

The shape of a bird's beak says a lot about what the bird eats. Whether long or short, broad or narrow, each type of beak is perfectly matched to a particular type of food. This collection of images shows a wide range of beak types and the kinds of food each might be used to eat.

Students can make and annotate weather observations with this interactive drawing tool produced by WGBH. The resulting images can be downloaded, printed, saved, and shared. Students can use the documentation of their firsthand observations to communicate data about their local weather patterns, and—overtime—to describe typical weather conditions expected during a particular season.

Players strive to create a balanced desert ecosystem in which each animal has enough food to survive over a period of 12 days, in this interactive game from PLUM LANDING™. Players see how the different species of plants and animals in a desert depend on one another. They also experiment with how changing the amount of one resource affects the whole ecosystem. 

In this interactive lesson, students learn that animals take care of their young in many of the same ways the adults in their lives take care of them. Students watch videos from NATURE and engage in a variety of activities to check for understanding and reinforce learning. First or second-grade students should be able to do the lesson independently or in pairs; younger students and struggling readers may need additional support. 

In this activity, you will become a historical detective, and progress through a variety of challenges and tasks. After a step-by-step investigation, you will discover how your community, the people in your area, and the land itself have changed over the course of history. You may even be able to describe what life was like where you live in 1628!

In this video, Craig is going to dive into the controversy of monetary and fiscal policy. Monetary and fiscal policy are ways the government, and most notably the Federal Reserve influences the economy--for better or for worse.

In this video, we're going to look at government regulation. We're going to talk about the government's goals for the U.S. economy and the policies it employs to achieve those goals. Ever since the New Deal, we've seen an increased role of the government within the economy--even with the deregulation initiatives of President Carter and Reagan in the '80s.

Traditionally, geography is studied as two interconnected parts: physical geography and human geography. For the first half of this series, we will be focusing on physical geography, which is all about recognizing the characteristics of the environment and the processes that create, modify, and destroy those environments. But remember, human-environment interactions are fundamental to studying geography so we won't be ignoring human impact, it just won't be the primary lens we're using to view the world. Today, we'll explore erosional gullies in Madagascar as we discuss the world's dynamic landscape, the Great Barrier Reef as we introduce the four major earth system (the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere), and we'll finish with a deep dive into Iceland as we introduce the major realms of physical geography. (These are geographer specializations that you may have heard about like topography, geomorphology, pedology, hydrology, climatology, oceanography, meteorology, and biogeography.)

Much like a cell membrane, our atmosphere forms a protective boundary between outer space and the biosphere that allows for all life to exist on Earth’s surface. Today, we’re going to talk about its composition and layers (the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, and thermosphere), follow the path of a sunbeam of light as it travels through space and (potentially) reaches Earth’s surface, and discuss how the greenhouse effect can be both a good and bad thing.

From navigating a cross-country road trip (or just finding the nearest coffee shop) to analyzing election results (or the latest meme on K-pop group popularity), maps play a huge role in how we interpret the world. Today, we're going to talk about the differences between reference maps and thematic maps, take a closer look at how projections play a part in how we perceive maps, and discuss the role of the cartographer (or map maker) in all of this. Maps are incredibly powerful tools and play a crucial role in how we understand the world, but they are also made by people, so it is our job to think critically about how these stories are being presented to us.

In this video, we're going to talk about how the Earth moves, but to do that, we're going to have to go way back to the early days of the galaxy. Processes that happened before the Earth even formed have led us to the geographic patterns and processes that create Earth's environments and support all living things. We'll talk about how the Earth rotates, the effects of it being slightly tilted, how events like sea ice melting impact how the Earth wobbles, and talk about how our elliptical orbit gives us seasons. So many of our life decisions are influenced by the motion of Earth. It guides where we decide to live, what food we eat, or even what weather we experience, which we'll talk about more next time.