Stromatolite Explorer Teacher's Guide:

A guide to the 7 minute animated feature depicting what it might be like to take a journey into a microbial mat. This guide contains detailed information about the subjects covered, as well as the National Standards and Objectives met by the video.

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Graphing Activity Lesson Plan :

The graphical display of scientific data is a fundamental step towards interpreting and understanding what the data mean. In this activity, a spreadsheet program is used to construct graphs using data from real experiments. The activity is meant to be used in conjunction with the Web Lab activity (below), but can also be used as a "stand alone" activity.

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Biogeochemical Cycles Activity Lesson Plan:

An interactive version of microbial mat metabolism! Students can act out the biogeochemical cycles in a microbial mat using a script in the Activity Plan below. Basic metabolic and chemical processes are explained in the activity.

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Download Illustrations of Mat Microbes

“It's Greek to Me” focuses on reading strategies to help students comprehend difficult text. Given a scientific article on microbial mats students will explore ways to make meaning of a text, explain how they reached the conclusions they did and apply these strategies to other reading experiences. Reading strategies include applying grammer and context clues to further comprehension, using knowledge of Greek and Latin prefixes, suffixes, and roots to break down unfamiliar words and determine their meaning, retelling and other methods to help determine meaning.

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