A Free Activity Book from NOAA

Discover Your World is a free activity book produced by NOAA. The book is available as to download as a complete package in one PDF or you can download it in three separate sections. The sections are titled Explore the Earth, Understand the Earth, and Protect the Earth. In total the book has 43 activities appropriate for most K-12 classrooms but the majority of the activities seem to be most appropriate for grades four through eight.

Applications for Education
The activities in Discover Your World are hands-on activities designed to help students learn about topics in meteorology and climatology. A few of the activities that I like include reading nautical charts, building a barometer, and being a weather reporter.

Note, the NOAA Celebrates 200 Years website is no longer being updated but the resources on the site are still available to download for free. 

How Fireworks Work

Fireworks are popping around my little town of Woodstock, Maine this evening. To my dogs the sounds of fireworks are the sounds of the sky falling. The upside of hearing the amateur fireworks displays is that it reminded me of a couple of videos about the science of fireworks.

If you or your children are wondering how the fireworks actually work, take a look at the following videos from National Geographic and Discovery News.



Both of these videos could be the basis of a flipped science lesson. In this post I provided an overview of how to use five services to create flipped video lessons.

How to Enable Automatic Grading in Google Forms

The new automatic grading function in Google Forms seems to be a hit with many readers. I've received a bunch of questions about it in the last week. To answer many of those questions I created the short video that you can see embedded below and or on my YouTube channel.