Intro to Solar System | Planetary Properties | Volcanology | Impact Craters
Dynamic Earth | Gradation | Gravity & Rockets | The Moon | Remote Sensing | Mars

Exploring Planets in the Classroom was a long-running summer workshop in Planetary Geosciences offered at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa for the state's K-12 educators and librarians under the direction of Dr. G. Jeffrey Taylor. Hands-on activities in this course were developed and/or tested by the Hawai‘i Space Grant Consortium in cooperation with educators statewide. In 1996 the workshop transformed into this website to assist educators and resource specialists around the globe to find hands-on activities that match science standards in elementary, middle, high school, and college classrooms.

These on-line activity pages are formatted for printing and direct classroom use. The original layout was developed by a team of educators in 1994 while producing NASA Publication EG-1997-10-116-HQ (first published as EP-306) Exploring the Moon: A Teacher's Guide with Activities for Earth and Space Sciences.

Free Use Policy
This is a public domain web site. We simply ask that the original URL and the Hawai‘i Space Grant Consortium credit is clearly marked on each page or portion used. Please contact lindamar@hawaii.edu when you use an activity or want to find out more about incorporating planetary science in your curriculum. We appreciate hearing from you and are willing to correspond ...because that helps us help you share the excitement of space! It also helps us write our end-of-the-year reports on how useful the web site is in different grade levels and settings across the planet. Thank you to all the educators from preschool to college, librarians, geology students, teachers-in-training, and coordinators of science programs who write to us when using these activities.

Example:
Hawaii Space Grant Consortium (1996) Gelatin Volcanoes. Exploring Planets in the Classroom. http://www.spacegrant.hawaii.edu/class_acts/GelVolTe.html (12 July 2014).

• Next Generation Science Standards (2013) The National Academies Press.
• AAAS/Project 2061 National Science Education Benchmarks.
• NCTM National Principles and Standards for School Mathematics.
• National Educational Technology Standards.
• NCGE National Geography Standards.

• PSRD Planetary Science Research Discoveries educational site sharing the latest research on planets, meteorites, and other solar system bodies being made by NASA-sponsored scientists. PSRD is a vital link for education, planetary and space science, and for learning how science works.
• Space Science Activities featured in Future Flight Hawai‘i, a K-12 Education project of the Hawai‘i Space Grant Consortium.
• NASA pages for students news, multimedia, contacts.
• NASA's Science Mission Directorate pages for students.
• NASA's pages for Space Exploration.
• NASA's Drop Tower Competitions for high school and middle school student teams, Microgravity projects at NASA Glenn Research Center.
• Solar System Lithographs. This set of fifteen photographs includes asteroids, comets, moons, planets, and the Sun, plus background information for each (pdf).
• Views of the Solar System multilingual presentation with images.
• Photojournal: NASA's Image Access homepage extensive archive of images from NASA planetary exploration programs.
• Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission homepage from NASA.
• Exploring the Moon Educator Guide and Activities.
• IMAGE from NASA's Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Explorer (IMAGE) satellite program, for learning about Earth's magnetic field, aurora, and how solar storms cause disturbances in the Earth's space environment.
• INSPIRE, bringing the excitement of observing natural and manmade radio waves in the audio region to high school students.
• Exploring Meteorite Mysteries Educator Guide and Activities from Johnson Space Center's Astromaterials Curation site.
• Astronomy and Space Science activities compiled by Andrew Fraknoi, Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
• EarthSky a daily science radio service and website covering water, energy, health, food biodiversity, Earth, space, and the human world.
• StarChild a learning center for the youngest astronomers from Goddard Space Flight Center.
• NASA's Discovery Program missions, news, and educational resources.
• LPI Education Resources Catalog products and resources for grades K-12, compiled by the Lunar and Planetary Institute. We are listed under "Curriculum Materials."
• National Science Teachers Association