Teaching Climate

This resource includes three lessons that build on one another and are designed to be taught sequentially to show how habitats and climate change are connected. Students make observations and collect data to create a healthy habitat for climate change.

Students learn about the role the sun plays in our daily lives and how solar energy can be used. Data is collected in the mini-lessons and demonstrations including observations with shadows, creating your own solar oven, and photosynthesis.

This lesson will give students a basic grasp of the value of preserving green spaces in urban areas to mitigate the effects of urban heat islands and climate change. In this lesson, students will research cities throughout the world that contain natural areas and discuss the advantages of greening our built environment.

This activity focuses on measuring, graphing, and interpreting rainfall following an 8 day rainfall event story in Boulder, Colorado from 2013. Data is from this real world example, and background materials including how to read the rain gauge are included.

This is an interactive video in which students navigate around a virtual island while learning about the characteristics of land formations and bodies of water.

These videos capture how the sun warms the Earth with support materials for teachers and students. Students will make observations to use as evidence that sunlight warms Earth's surface.

This cartoon shows where streams start and where they end up.

These 'warming stripe' graphics are visual representations of the change in temperature as measured in each country over the past 100+ years. Each stripe represents the temperature in that country averaged over a year.

Students observe, sketch, and describe clouds on their own before learning to identify cloud types by comparing photos of different clouds to their sketches.

This lesson is an instructor demonstration that focuses specifically on two aspects of the water cycle: evaporation and condensation. This is a well described instructor led demonstration for introducing and exploring the water cycle.