In this activity, students play a game that simulates the carbon cycle. During the activity students will compare the carbon cycle before and after the industrial revolution.
Students will create an animation to represent one of the many feedback loops that influences climate change. To create their animation, students will use clay, cut paper, whiteboard or other materials commonly found in the classroom. They will make a storyboard, plan a narration, rehearse their animation and then film their animation with stop-motion photography.
Students engage in lessons where they develop some basic background knowledge about climate change drawing on research from scientists around the world. They will begin to develop key ideas that climate change is happening, we can observe it and it is a global problem. Students also begin to understand some of the lines of climate change evidence. More fundamentally, Unit 1 explores the relationship between climate and life, helping students explain the difference between weather and climate.
This toolkit was designed to support educators in teaching the fundamental scientific concepts of climate change.
In this lesson, students work in groups, plotting carbon dioxide concentrations over time on overheads and estimating the rate of change over five years. Stacked together, the overheads for the whole class show an increase of carbon dioxide over five years and annual variation driven by photosynthesis.
In this lesson, students will research and prepare an almanac on the Arctic. They then examine the laws that attempt to provide jurisdiction over this area and consider how these laws will be affected if geography of the Arctic continues to change due to the effects of global warming.
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In this lesson, students investigate climate change and search for and evaluate evidence of change. Students will then write a scientific argument using evidence and reasoning to support claims. Students will also be able to reflect on the weaknesses in their own arguments in order to improve their argument and then respond to other arguments.
This series of videos, produced by The National Research Council, summarizes the current state of knowledge about climate change and its causes.
This video provides information about the causes and effects of Earth's changing climate, specifically focusing on wildlife populations and the impact global warming has on habitats.
Students read and analyze a topical news article about some aspect of climate change and share their analysis with their classmates.
When water utility personnel recognized their groundwater withdrawals were damaging ecosystems in the Tampa Bay area, they found new ways to reduce their dependence on it.
Students will see how Earth's temperature rises as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases.
This interactive explores sea ice, sea level, carbon emissions, and average global temperature over time.
In this activity students will explore the Greenhouse Effect. This activity includes videos and questions to help supplement student learning.
In this hands-on lab activity, you will test the greenhouse potential of two easily acquired greenhouse gas samples: water vapor, carbon dioxide.
Find areas that are predicted to change because of climate change.
GeoInquiries are designed to be fast and easy-to-use instructional resources that incorporate advanced web mapping technology. Each 15-minute activity in a collection is intended to be presented by the instructor from a single computer/projector classroom arrangement. No installation, fees, or logins are necessary to use these materials and software.
In this lesson, students are introduced to normal seasonal sea surface temperature (SST) variation as well as extreme variation, as in the case of El Niño and La Niña events, in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. They will learn how to download seasonal SST data from the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL), via a THREDDS server, for the years 1982 to 1998. With My World GISTM, they will visualize and analyze that data, looking for the tell-tale SST signature of El Niño and La Niña events that occurred during that time period. At the conclusion of the chapter, students will be given the opportunity to analyze a season of their own choosing to determine if an El Niño and La Niña SST pattern emerged in that year's data.
In this activity students will learn about the Dust Bowl, powerful dust storms carrying millions of tons of stinging, blinding black dirt swept across the Southern Plains–the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, western Kansas, and the eastern portions of Colorado and New Mexico.