ORC Resource Types

Discipline: Science

Professional Commentary: Students explore the effect of heating and cooling on the dispersal of food coloring in water. The primary purpose of this activity is to allow students to observe that hotter conditions can speed up changes in materials....

Discipline: Science

Professional Commentary: This lesson is designed to help students understand the changes that a blue crab goes through during molting, and why it is important for scientists to understand these changes. It is important to understand the changes an animal goes through during its life span in order to research what may be causing that animal some difficulty...

Discipline: Science

Professional Commentary: Students experimentally measure the strength of a magnet and graph how the strength changes as the distance from the magnet increases, and as the barrier (masking tape) is built between the magnet and an iron object. This lesson presumes that students have had some introductory experiences with magnets and the types of materials that are magnetic....

Discipline: Science

Professional Commentary: This lesson will focuses on the digestive system. Students identify the major organs of the digestive system and determine the function of each organ....

Projects: Standards First

Discipline: English Language Arts

Professional Commentary: This web-based thematic unit has a wide range of resources and activities for grades 4-7. An overview of the unit, lesson outlines, and links to student activities are provided....

Discipline: Science

Professional Commentary: Students investigate the habitats of local plants and animals and explore some of the ways animals depend on plants and each other. In this lesson, students will observe living organisms in a local ecosystem and create detailed drawings and descriptions of them....

Discipline: Science

Professional Commentary: Students plan, build, and test a ramp that allows objects to roll far. It is recommended that students have experience with ramps before they attempt to build their own....

Projects: Standards First

Discipline: Science

Professional Commentary: The purpose of this lab activity is to demonstrate (through simulation) how DNA fingerprinting (or DNA profiling) might be used to solve a crime. In this activity, students perform restriction digests on DNA samples from four individuals, and then search for similarities between the individuals by running the restriction fragments on an electrophoresis gel....

Projects: Standards First

Discipline: Science

Professional Commentary: Using this resource, students determine what artifacts are, how they are discovered, and what information can be learned from them. Students may know very general things about people: what they need to live and that they live in families and communities....

Discipline: Science

Professional Commentary: Students explore and measure the rate of spherical objects rolling down a ramp. This Science NetLinks lesson is the first in a two part series on ramp building....