Students are presented with a guide to rain garden construction in an activity that culminates the unit and pulls together what they have learned and prepared in materials during the three previous associated activities. They learn about the four vertical zones that make up a typical rain garden with the purpose to cultivate natural infiltration of stormwater. Student groups create personal rain gardens planted with native species that can be installed on the school campus, within the surrounding community, or at students' homes to provide a green infrastructure and low-impact development technology solution for areas with poor drainage that often flood during storm events.

Students learn about weight by building a spring scale and observing how it responds to objects with different masses.

Students will experiment with different areas of the garden that absorb heat from the sun the best.

Students will experiment with different areas of the garden that absorb heat from the sun the best.

Students will explore the outdoor classroom for natural examples of heat transfer through conduction, convection, and radiation.

Students will take temperature readings and collect anecdotal evidence to determine how different materials absorb the sun's heat.

Students gain first-hand experience on how friction affects motion. They build a hovercraft using air from a balloon to levitate a craft made from a compact disc (CD), learning that a bed of air under an object significantly reduces the friction as it slides over a surface.

Students measure and analyze forces that act on vehicles pulling heavy objects while moving at a constant speed on a frictional surface. They study how the cars interact with their environments through forces, and discover which parameters in the design of the cars and environments could be altered to improve vehicles' pulling power. This LEGO® MINDSTORMS® based activity is geared towards, but not limited to, physics students.

Students will use knowledge of the sun's characteristics to find evidence in the outdoor classroom that support various scientific claims.

Students learn how to set up pre-programmed microcontroller units like the Arduino LilyPad and use them to enhance a product’s functionality and personality. They do this by making plush toys in monster shapes (template provided) with microcontrollers and LEDs sewn into the felt fabric with conductive thread to make circuits. At activity end, each student will have created his or her own plush toy, complete with LEDs that illuminate in a specified sequence: random twinkle, blink, heartbeat and/or breathing.

In this activity, students gain first-hand experience with the mechanical advantage of pulleys. Students are given the challenge of helping save a whale by moving it from an aquarium back to its natural habitat into the ocean. They set up different pulley systems, compare the theoretical and actual mechanical advantage of each and discuss their recommendations as a class.

Students will explore the outdoor classroom for materials that are attracted to magnets.

In this lesson the students will explore the outdoor classroom for materials that are attracted to magnets.

In this activity, students use their own creativity (and their bodies) to make longitudinal and transverse waves. Through the use of common items, they will investigate the different between longitudinal and transverse waves.

Students will create micro-landforms outside in order to mimic landforms and generate maps.

Students explore Mars and Jupiter, the fourth and fifth planets from the Sun. They learn some of the unique characteristics of these planets. They also learn how engineers help us learn about these planets with the design and development of telescopes, deep space antennas, spacecraft and planetary rovers.

In this lesson the students will go on a scavenger hunt trying to find objects that have definite physical properties such as shape, mass temperature, texture and flexibility.

In this lesson the students will observe and record properties of rocks based on properties such as size, weight, shape, color or texture.

Students observe and discuss a cup and pencil model of a cyclone to better understand the science behind how this pollutant recovery method functions in cleaning industrial air pollution.

STUDENT ACTIVITY - 4th - TXThis is a distance-learning lesson students can complete at home. The student will compare and contrast a variety of mixtures, including solutions, that they can make outdoors. This activity was created by Out Teach (out-teach.org), a nonprofit providing outdoor experiential learning to transform Science education for students in under-served communities.