Teaching Climate

In this lesson, students think about where the energy they use on a daily basis comes from, including completing a tour of their school boiler/furnace room led by maintenance staff. Students will then confirm the knowledge by creating a flow chart map of where the energy is coming from to make different decisions in the future about energy consumption.

This resource from MIT engages students in a conversation about their unique skills and perspectives that can contribute to climate change solutions. In this discussion based activity, students will listen to a 17-minute episode from the Today I Learned: Climate podcast and reflect on the stories presented. They then work in small groups to brainstorm and discuss the intersections of their individual skills, passions, and priorities as they relate to climate change.

This resource from Boston University includes an informational animation with text to demonstrate the changes in prime movers of electricity generation in the United States between 1891 and 2021. The information is related back to the feasibility of certain prime movers that are used today.

Students analyze and interpret Arctic albedo data to evaluate the effect of declining sea ice on the Arctic system. They connect this information to climate and finish by constructing a conceptual model that explains how declining sea ice is changing both the Arctic's albedo and Earth's climate.

This activity asks students to identify the best locations for wind farms based on the connection between surface roughness and wind speed. Students are directed to use a data tool called Global Wind Atlas to identify optimal locations for wind farms.

This website focuses on Ojibwe wild rice harvesting (manoomin). It is a celebration of the historical practice of wild rice harvesting, why it is so important to Ojibwe life, and how climate change can impact this resource. The topic is explained well, in-depth and there is a supplemental video and other topics you can explore.

In this lesson, students will watch videos and analyze data to understand how choices made today will affect the extent of global climate change and the impacts felt throughout the world. Then, students will develop a climate change action plan for their community.

In this video, learn how John Tyndall designed an experiment to reveal evidence that carbon dioxide traps heat. Teachers could use this resource to consider the role carbon dioxide plays in regulating Earth's temperature and its relationship to current trends in global warming.

This video discusses the fossil fuel fingerprint in isotopic analysis of atmospheric carbon dioxide. It does an excellent job of presenting this topic, which is too often overlooked in other discussions of the evidence for anthropogenic global warming.

This lesson contains two activities to demonstrate two consequences of burning fossil fuels: air pollution and the greenhouse effect. In the first activity, students simulate the greenhouse effect with an enclosed beaker, water, Alka Seltzer, and a light source. In the second activity, a candle produces soot on a jar to simulate air pollution. Teachers should lead a wrap-up discussion to relate the two activities to the burning of fossil fuels.