In elementary school science, students are required to study experientially out in the field. However, field observation of riverside pebbles in the “Function of running water” class is often difficult to implement. In this study, teaching materials that combine full-scale photographs and riverside pebbles were created. When this was practiced at an elementary school along the Oita River, students were able to observe the teaching materials. Therefore, it was judged that these teaching materials were more effective than the pebbles-only teaching materials.

We brought a self-made planetarium into a vacant room of an elementary school to study why a planetarium was effective for pupils’ learning of stars and constellations. The results of questionnaire surveys from before and after the lesson showed that 90% of the children knew that there were stars of different brightness in the sky even before the lesson, and that the percentage of children who understood that there were stars of different colors increased from 76% (pre-lesson) to 93% (post-lesson).The lesson had no effect on the pupils’ understanding that the arrangement of stars in a constellation remains fixed even if time passes. Regarding this, 66% of students selected the right answer in the post-lesson questionnaire but only 30% selected the correct reason for this. Interest about stars and constellations did not differ before and after the lesson. The lesson with the planetarium was interesting for students. About 40 students can sit down in the air dome, which has a radius of 3 m.

This study proposes a new study program based on the W-style problem-solving model on the formation of igneous rocks. This was implemented in a junior high school science class. The program used two approaches. First, learning contents regarding igneous rock formation processes were arranged within a diachronic thinking framework. Second, inquisitive activities involving crystal growth experiments, which were planned and conducted by students, were repeated at each stage of the diachronic thinking framework. During the lessons, the students conducted experiments they had designed themselves with their teacher’s support and discussed the formative process of the porphyritic texture of igneous rocks in relation to magma migration processes. Consequently, around 90% of the students were found to understand the formation processes for porphyritic texture; that is, the students were considered to be at the inter-stage linkage level of diachronic thinking.

This paper explains how to draw a graph of flow velocity changes from columnar section data using the Hjulström diagram. The procedure is as follows:(1) recognition of erosional and/or depositional events within a columnar section,(2) reading flow velocity for each event using the Hjulström diagram,(3) plotting the readings, and (4) drawing a curve of flow velocity changes. In the procedure, sedimentological knowledge is required, especially for the recognition of erosional events, but the changes in flow velocity can be drawn only with depositional events, which are easy to recognize in columnar sections.