Utilizing the Lake Superior watershed and the St. Louis River as a foundation for learning
The curriculum download is a PDF document that will help your students explore bathymetric maps of the Great Lakes! There are a few instructions on how to get things set up for the students to explore (it's easy, I promise!) but after that the students can explore the Great Lakes.
This lesson will guide students through learning about Lake Whitefish, a valuable fish for commercial fishermen, and how climate and profit impacts fishermen’s livelihood. Students will learn facts about whitefish, learn about local fishing businesses, and apply what they’ve learned using economics to decide whether their business can continue to stay open with different scenarios. Curriculum download is a PDF lesson to run this with your class. Supporting file download is a PDF document with fact cards and question cards all about whitefish and fishing in the region.
Students will gather items they can find in nature to put as parts in a cell. The catch is that students must explain why that item represents the cell organelle by using metaphors, similes, or other explanations. Prerequisite: Students must have a firm understanding of cell parts and functions. This lesson would be great as a unit wrap-up lesson. An example would be that an acorn could represent a vesicle because it transports seeds to other places in a protective casing like a vesicle transports proteins in a cell. Curriculum download is a PDF version of the lesson plan. The Supporting File download is a PDF document with cell part labels.
Attached is a student copy and teacher copy of a short assignment students can do to understand how to (and where to) enter data in a data table. There are five "journal entries" from two "scientists" that are studying Otter River. Students will use the journal entries to enter data into the table at the bottom of the page. Curriculum download is a PDF student copy of the worksheet. Supporting File is a PDF teacher copy of the worksheet.
This lesson gives a small introduction to dissolved oxygen. The Reserve has the equipment needed for the lesson. The Curriculum download is a PDF document of the lesson plan. The Supporting File is an informational packet for students in PDF form.
Did you wake up in July of 2016 during a thunderstorm and the next morning see images of flooded Wisconsin rivers in the news? Floods like these could have a big impact on the Lake Superior of the future. Take a look at play-by-play data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Park Service and US Geological Survey to help you and your students make sense of big picture impacts to our watershed and our communities. The Curriculum download is a PDF of the lesson plan. The Supporting File is a PDF containing the data packets, prediction tables, and associated student worksheets.
Students will play a game of survival by creating fish with dominant and recessive traits to understand how evolution through adaptations of structures and functions help with survival and continuation of genetic variations. The curriculum download is a PDF of the lesson plan for running this lesson with your students. The supporting file is the student worksheet.
Students will learn about different types of pollution that can be present in water, ways those types of pollution can be handled, what Areas of Concerns are, and what can be done to clean up (and keep clean) Areas of Concerns in the St. Louis River Estuary. The curriculum download is a PDF lesson plan for this activity. The supporting file is a PowerPoint slideshow to support the lesson.
This lesson outline and PowerPoint guide you and your students through learning about watersheds by making your own! Students will make their own landscape and hypothesize where water and land are on their landscape. They can add places of human activity and predict what will happen to their watershed when it "rains"! This is a fun, short activity that can be extended to emphasize key ideas. The Enviroscape from the Great Lakes Aquarium is optional but very useful for this lesson! The curriculum download is a PDF lesson plan for this activity. The supporting file is a PowerPoint slideshow to support this lesson.
Attached is a short lesson with data and graphs (for students to compare since the X axis aligns). This is data from the Nemadji River for river flow as well as corresponding rainfall. This will compare baseline data with the flood data from 2012. Includes worksheet to guide students through the analysis. The curriculum download is a PDF including the lesson plan and data set. The supporting file is the student worksheet.