Healthy Habitats: Climate Change Action for K-2

Notes from our reviewers

The CLEAN collection is hand-picked and rigorously reviewed for scientific accuracy and classroom effectiveness. Read what our review team had to say about this resource below or learn more about how CLEAN reviews teaching materials.

• Teaching Tips
  These are excellent resources for introducing K-2 students to nature journaling, observation skills, and habitats. Focussing on place-based education, students utilize materials that can be readily found around their school. Educators should be aware that you will need to complete all three lessons in order to cover how habitats and climate change are connected in a way that is cohesive and supportive of students' mental health. There are extension activities for each lesson including a literacy and math connection activity. Ultimately, the lesson leads to suggestions on how to make positive changes through collective action at their school. Ideally part of each of these lessons would be taught outdoors. This lesson does a great job of using a habitat theme to potentially incorporate Indigenous knowledge and Traditional Ecological Knowledge, as it lends itself to emphasis on observation, incorporating lived experience and community-based concerns, recognizing humans as part of nature, and considering human relationships to other living beings. This would require teacher participation to find this traditional knowledge of the specific area, but is mentioned and celebrated in the lesson plans.
• About the Science
  These are lessons that focus on observations and nature journaling while introducing topics of habitats, living vs. non-living things, and animals. There are three lessons: "What is a Habitat", "What a Healthy Habitat Looks Like", and "How Can We Care for and Protect Our Habitat", which all combine into a detailed booklet, taking 3-4 days to introduce. References are included for vocabulary definitions in the appendices. Passed initial science review - expert science review pending.
• About the Pedagogy
  This resource includes three lessons, and each of those lessons include a teacher section and a student section with worksheets. Each lesson offers clear objectives, outcomes, teacher prep time, materials needed, resources, and extensions. All of the lessons are divided into three sections: 1) Engage, 2) Explore, and 3) Explain and Elaborate Other appendices include tips for teaching the lessons, game instructions, mindfulness instructions, tips for teaching outdoors, and expectations for behavior outdoors. The outdoor education aspect of this lesson is very engaging, as students get to create a nature journal, play an I-spy type game, read books, construct dioramas, and engage in an activity to create an action project that helps habitats around the school. There are extension activities for math and literacy connections for each lesson. Each lesson has a checklist of academic standards met, including life science, earth and space sciences, and scientific methods. This is a great lesson to engage K-2 learners in climate change and help them to develop agency in finding climate solutions.
• Technical Details/Ease of Use
  There are excellent instructions and detailed lesson plans that list extra activities to use, allows the classroom to focus on their specific habitats around the classroom, and give background/supplemental materials. Educators will need to create a login to access the free materials. All Climate Generation resources are free with account login. This lesson is easy to use, don't be deterred by it's length! It is over 50 pages, but the first several pages are more of an intro about the organization that developed the activities and climate change. Several of the pages are part of the appendix. For Appendix A (the student appendix), users will need access to a Google Drive account. There may be difficulty downloading the large document, so plan ahead for such a scenario.