Teaching Climate

In this lesson, students create a vision for the future of their community and identify what resources are most important to them as a starting point for resilience planning.

This interactive activity allows students to explore the costs (emissions) and benefits (energy production) of various energy sources Students can compare the environmental impacts of different energy sources.

Explaining mitigation vs adaptation can be tricky but this activity has clearly defined each of the terms for students. Students will gain a better understanding of mitigation and adaptation through real-life examples included in the card sorting activity.

This interactive map allows students to explore current and future projections across a global and regional scale for different variables such as temperature and precipitation.

This lab activity teaches students about isotopes in ice cores and how different isotopes can tell us about the past climate. Students measure the mass of pennies as a proxy for different isotopes and build an understanding of how they oscillate through time. Students will then compare their results with the actual isotopes from real ice cores.

This two-part lab series from the US Ice Drilling Program teaches students about the process of science. It supports an understanding of how scientists use direct and indirect measurements to gain insight into natural phenomena. Students are asked to graph and analyze data, draw conclusions, and create mathematical models.

This video from Texas Tech Climate Science Center describes best practices for engaging in a discussion about climate change with a person who disagrees about the scale of the problem, or outright denies climate change. The video presents an argument with multiple lines of evidence to suggest a more effective discussion approach, such as identifying an agreed upon value, and suggesting how climate change oriented solutions can support that value.

In this activity, students evaluate climate change narratives for content and story-telling qualities before creating their own narrative on a severe weather event.

This video reviews the benefits and drawbacks associated with growing corn to make ethanol.

In this video, scientist Dr. Susan Prichard discusses the impact of pine bark beetles on western forests. She explains how climate change, specifically rising temperatures, is exacerbating the problem.