Teaching Climate

In this 45-60 minute high-stakes board game, everyone wins or everyone loses. As they play, groups of three to four children ages 8 to 13 build an understanding of how human actions impact global change. As teams, children play a game in which chance and choice determine the fate of a lone polar bear on an ice floe.

Students perform a lab to explore how the color of materials at Earth's surface affect the amount of warming. Topics covered include developing a hypothesis, collecting data, and making interpretations to explain why dark-colored materials become hotter.

This multi-lesson set is focused on environmental justice and social science. It asks students to consider inequality and justice in the context of their own lives and the environment through a series of both hands-on and research-focused activities.

This lesson set serves as an introduction to the topic of environmental justice via a tag game, flash card activity and discussion, and an art lesson for students to create their own environmental justice heroes. It includes thorough background materials and activities to think about before leading the lesson, including cultural adaptation notes and social and emotional support suggestions.

This activity tells a story through the eyes of a salmon, as told by Indigenous tribes of the Northwest. It celebrates traditional knowledge and how humans can think about the natural world through the view point of salmon.

In this activity, students connect art and science by creating a drawing and conceptual model of the thermohaline circulation. Students get to create drawings to understand how water moves in the ocean and the impacts of that movement.

This lesson provides a demonstration and lesson focused on ocean currents. The demonstration of how cold water and warm water interact is a strong learning tool for the topic.

This visualization depicts the global water cycle. It includes how human water use affects where water is stored, how it moves, and how clean it is.

In this interactive lesson, students will use kinesthetic techniques to model Earth's orbit around the Sun for a year. In this activity students will understand the astronomical meaning of an earth year, and learn the difference between a rotation and an orbit.

Carbon cycle activity to demonstrate how carbon moves throughout the atmosphere. The activity ends with a discussion of how humans impact the carbon cycle.