In the Education Office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, we’re always working to bring exciting scientific content to K-12 classrooms. Educators can access many of these free resources, classroom materials and activities online, and we’re adding more all the time. The inspiration for these products often comes from the work being done at JPL and NASA, but sometimes it’s the teachers we work with whose creative ideas inspire the lessons we share with our community of STEM educators. Our new column, Teacher Feature, is an effort to capture those creative ideas and highlight the teachers behind them.
Loriann Pawlik recently shared her NASA-inspired lesson during a professional development workshop hosted by the agency.
Loriann teaches STEM to grades K-5 at Penn Elementary School in Prince William County, Virginia, which focuses on students learning English, as well as those with learning disorders and autism. When she recently came across a lesson on the NASA/JPL Edu website, she saw an opportunity to bring real-world NASA data to her students.
How do you use NASA in the classroom?
Using the lesson “How to Read a Heat Map” as a jumping-off point, Loriann had her students first dive into the practice of reading and interpreting graphs. From here, she extended the lesson with an exploration of NASA satellites and the data they collect, focusing on the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment, or GRACE mission, to tie in with a community science night on water science.
GRACE was launched in 2002 to track changes in the distribution of liquid water, ice and land masses on Earth by measuring changes in the planet’s gravity field every 30 days. Circling Earth 16 times each day, GRACE spent more than 15 years collecting data – all of which is available online – before its science mission ended last October. The mission provided students the perfect context to study climate and water through authentic NASA data.
Loriann's students plotted changes in Earth's gravitational field using data from NASA's GRACE mission.
How did students react to the lesson?
Loriann set the stage for her students by explaining to them that they would be providing their data to NASA scientists.
“I told them that I was working on a project for a scientist from NASA-JPL and that we needed their help,” she said via email. “By the time I gave them the background and showed a brief GRACE video, they were all in – excited, eager enthusiastic! It helped that each table, or ‘engineering group,’ was responsible for a different U.S. state.”
As a result, students were able to plot the changes in gravitational fields for multiple locations over several years.
What are other ways you use NASA lessons or resources?
By extending the lesson, Loriann gave her students a sense of authentic ownership of the data and practice in real scientific analysis. But it wasn’t her first time uniting NASA science with her school curriculum:
“I'd been working with our second-graders on field studies of habitats,” Loriann explained. “We observed, journaled and tracked the migration of monarch butterflies, discussed what happened to habitats of living things since Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma were just going through, and then I used the [NASA Mars Exploration website] to have students extend the findings to space habitats.”
Have a great idea for implementing NASA research in your class or looking to bring NASA science into your classroom? The Educator Professional Development Collaborative, or EPDC, can help. The EPDC at JPL serves educators in the greater Los Angeles area. Contact JPL education specialist Brandon Rodriguez at brandon.rodriguez@jpl.nasa.gov. Note: Due to the popularity of EPDC programs, JPL may not be able to fulfill all requests.
Outside the Southern California area? The EPDC operates in all 50 states. Find an EPDC specialist near you.
The EPDC is managed by Texas State University as part of the NASA Office of Education. A free service for K-12 educators nationwide, the EPDC connects educators with the classroom tools and resources they need to foster students’ passion for careers in STEM and produce the next generation of scientists and engineers.
TAGS: Teaching, K-12, NASA in the Classroom, Graphing, Activities, Science, Earth Science, Climate Change
Loriann's students plotted changes in Earth's gravitational field using data from NASA's GRACE mission.
Loriann set the stage for her students by explaining to them that they would be providing their data to NASA scientists.
“I told them that I was working on a project for a scientist from NASA-JPL and that we needed their help,” she said via email. “By the time I gave them the background and showed a brief GRACE video, they were all in – excited, eager enthusiastic! It helped that each table, or ‘engineering group,’ was responsible for a different U.S. state.”
As a result, students were able to plot the changes in gravitational fields for multiple locations over several years.
By extending the lesson, Loriann gave her students a sense of authentic ownership of the data and practice in real scientific analysis. But it wasn’t her first time uniting NASA science with her school curriculum:
“I'd been working with our second-graders on field studies of habitats,” Loriann explained. “We observed, journaled and tracked the migration of monarch butterflies, discussed what happened to habitats of living things since Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma were just going through, and then I used the [NASA Mars Exploration website] to have students extend the findings to space habitats.”
Have a great idea for implementing NASA research in your class or looking to bring NASA science into your classroom? The Educator Professional Development Collaborative, or EPDC, can help. The EPDC at JPL serves educators in the greater Los Angeles area. Contact JPL education specialist Brandon Rodriguez at brandon.rodriguez@jpl.nasa.gov. Note: Due to the popularity of EPDC programs, JPL may not be able to fulfill all requests.
The EPDC is managed by Texas State University as part of the NASA Office of Education. A free service for K-12 educators nationwide, the EPDC connects educators with the classroom tools and resources they need to foster students’ passion for careers in STEM and produce the next generation of scientists and engineers.
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