Teaching Climate

In this lesson students learn about how temperature values can vary depending on color (white vs. black) and light (direct light vs. shade) by making a hypothesis and testing it with thermometers. Students learn about strategies to keep cool during extreme heat.

This activity involves building a tiny, wind-powered elevator in the form of a small cup lifted by a pinwheel. The elevator could be used to lift things from the ground floor to the second floor of a house you make from shoe boxes.

This activity focuses on adapting to climate change and building resilience to heavy rainfalls in the context of a garden. Students devise, create, and test ideas for protecting a garden from heavy rains.

This resource outlines an engaging role-play activity in which students apply knowledge of wildfire mitigation, preparedness, and resilience to planning for community wildfire preparedness. The game also includes content related to the mental health impacts of wildfire, multicultural needs and responses, and housing availability and affordability.

This is an in-depth activity that focuses on Wisconsin ecosystem characteristics and energy flow within ecosystems. The activity is lengthy, but selected parts of it could be adapted to a variety of teaching situations.

This activity provides information on how to access and use a wealth of data and tools from NOAA to analyze climate through time. A video tutorial and background information are provided and show students how to interact with and use tools to analyze temperature and precipitation data for specific cities, states, countries, and the world.

This activity focuses on cloud identification and art. It combines art and science and uses art history to help students in their observations and cloud descriptions.

In this activity students learn about the story of coal, firewood, wind, and how energy gets transferred to these different sources. It is set in a Reader's Theater type activity where students are engaged in actively acting the story out.

In this lesson, students will discuss how we use energy every day and where it comes from. Students will then draw or sort energy flow diagrams and write a paragraph to explain their diagrams.

This resource from AK Energy Smart uses background text, a worksheet, and a classroom activity to teach concepts related to calculating energy usage and cost per appliance by region. This resource supports an understanding of how energy sources effect regional cost, basic mathematical calculations for energy usage, and the impact of behavior on energy cost and usage.