Middle School Inquiry Lab on Tides
In this lab students will use high and low tide data for one lunar month and determine the moon phases that correlate with spring and neap tides.
Each inquiry lab will contain an essential question that will drive the lesson and make students think. For this lesson, the essential question is:
- How do gravity and inertia affect Earth’s tides?
BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND MATERIALS LIST:
Students will begin the lab by reading the essential question and background information. This can be done individually, as lab groups, or as a whole class. If you consider lab groups, you also might include some type of whole class formative checks before digging into the lab.
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Materials List:
- colored pencils or markers (red, blue, yellow, green, orange, and pink)
- pencil
PROCEDURE:
For this lab, students will create a double line graph plotting the high and low tides during a 30-day time measurement. Once the data is plotted, students will have to predict when there was a new moon, first quarter moon, full moon and third/last quarter moon. Finally, using clues provided, students will have to identify what Moon phases took place during this time frame as well.
CONCLUSION
Students will go back to the essential question and write a CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) to conclude the lab. Once completed, students will reflect back on their learning by answering the following questions:
- Looking at the graph, on what two set of dates did a spring tide occur?
- In a complete sentence, describe the position of Earth, the Moon, and the Sun during a spring tide.
- Looking at the graph, on what two set of dates did a neap tide occur?
- In a complete sentence, describe the position of Earth, the Moon, and the Sun during a neap tide.
MODIFIED AND INDEPENDENT INQUIRY VERSIONS
All of the Kesler Science inquiry labs come with three different modification levels. Each lab is differentiated using the icons below.
STANDARDS ALIGNMENT
TEKS: 8.7C - Relate the positions of the Moon and the Sun to their effect on ocean tides.
