About this resource
- Appropriate grades
- 3–12
- Subjects
- science (astronomy, biology and life science, chemistry, environmental science, geology, natural history, space exploration)
- Provider
- American Museum of Natural History
- Special requirements
- Shockwave Flash is required for the games.
Legal
This catalog record is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. This license applies to the content of this page only and does not apply to the referenced website.
Did you know that a cockroach can live for a whole week without a head? They are not making this stuff up... you can learn a great deal, from important basic concepts to much more obscure trivia, if you visit the Ology site. Ology from the American Museum of Natural History introduces "the study of" favorite science subjects. Learn, quiz yourself, meet the 'ologists... this site has it all. A simple registration process (30 seconds, really!) and you can begin to collect the OLogy cards from all around the site. Flip Over your cards for facts and fun related to the subject.
Educator's guide
Created by the American Museum of Natural History, OLogy looks at biodiversity, genetics, astronomy and paleontology with engaging activities and multimedia resources for students from upper elementary school on up. Within the areas presented, you can learn about the subjects, do activities, meet experts and collect Ology cards, rewards for successful completion of various online activities. There are even activities to print or save for later in each area, look for the Stuff to Do to find activities designed to be used away from the computer.
Think you're a Space Expert? Start your exploration of Our Place in
Space at the Quiz. If
you're quickly humbled, as I was, you can move throughout the various topics in
the astronomy section to discover the right answers. Gravity, Stars, the Sun,
the Milky Way Galaxy and beyond can be navigated either in order or just click
on the topic of interest to you. Complete the experience with a Cosmic
Cookie break, recipe in the Stuff to Do section.
Everyone loves dinosaurs! The Big Dig will provide information and activities for the aspiring paleontologists in your class. Get inside the brain of the experts as they examine fossils and construct ideas about what dinosaurs looked like, how they lived, and how they died. Fossil facts and definitions and resources for finding fossils are of particular interest to Earth and Environmental Science classes.
The Gene Scene raises questions and provides some answers about genetics, DNA and cloning. Issues approached are ethics in cloning, nature vs. nurture, and genetic modification, each one providing some questions that could lead to an active class discussion. Print resources to have available for reference are listed in the booklist section of Stuff to Do.
Finally, the Biodiversity section examines the rich variety of life on Earth. Explore the Tree of Life cladogram showing common ancestors and close and distant relatives of various species or read about the fieldwork of biologists. Find out where ingredients in the food you eat comes from in the Global Grocery and the Bio-Benefits to humans of maintaining biodiversity. Find out more about how to study biodiversity in the Alternatives to the Animal Report article, linked under Related Articles to the right.
There are many different names for "the study of" subjects in science, many are defined here. The site is rich and deep, the best approach is the Site Map, that way you can be sure not to miss anything!
