Classroom

Antarctica Expedition

Dr. Monika Kress, VPL Team member since 2003, will be sharing her experiences on this year's Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) trip with Ms. Melissa Moser's third grade class at Bernice Curren Elementary School in Oxnard, California.

Ms. Moser's class will track Monika's journey from Los Angeles International Airport, where the ANSMET team will gather to embark on their journey. On November 28th, the team will fly from LAX to Christchurch, New Zealand, to collect their gear, and then travel to McMurdo Station, on the Antarctic continent.

We will tailor our classroom activities to address the Grade Three Science Content Standards for the state of California.

This is also an opportunity for the students to learn about geography, which is one of the learning standards in the Grade Three History and Social Science Content Standards.

We can address several science learning standards by having these students learn the answers to these questions: What are meteorites? Where do they come from? What are asteroids? Why is Antarctica a good place to look for meteorites? What would you have to do to collect rocks from other planets? Do we have pieces of all 8 other planets? Why do we only have rocks from Mars and the Moon and the asteroids?

Dr. Kress will also be teaching astrobiology at the college level this coming fall, at Seattle University. She plans to make her course materials available to other educators who are teaching similar courses at other colleges and universities. On this forthcoming website, she will list the course syllabus, useful astrobiology education links, and other information that may be useful to educators.