Climate Change: Understanding & Engagement

Driving questions: What are the human impacts on the environment/Earth systems? How can I minimize my impacts?

Middle school students build, explore, and adapt models, practicing the process of science and using data to reach a scientific conclusion in this integrated, hands-on, evidence-based curriculum.

This curriculum may be used to plan an introductory unit ranging from four weeks to an in-depth semester study depending upon school curriculum, time constraints, and optional student projects, products and presentations. Teachers can go deeper into sectors affected by climate change by renting our other modules. This curriculum  will provide students with learning experiences that enable them to:

• Apply scientific principles to climate change.

• Support arguments and explanations with multiple sources of relevant and valid evidence.

• Use and construct different models and apply them in appropriate situations to describe or illustrate climate change phenomena and interactions within a system.

• Identify and clarify questions about climate change.

• Design and evaluate solutions that reduce the impacts and causes of climate change.

• Specify relationships between variables and decipher cause and effect relationships in a system.

• Plan and execute action projects in their home, school, or community.

• Oceans, Ice, & Climate Change Module

• Oceans, Ice, & Climate Change mini curriculum

  Driving Questions: How are sea level rise and melting ice related to climate change?  How does this affect New England’s coastal communities?

  Oceans, Ice, & Climate Change is a module meant to accompany the Climate Change: Understanding & Engagement curriculum. This module focuses on hands-on labs that allow students to see first hand how climate change affects the oceans and ice covered areas of the earth. This curriculum will provide students with learning experiences that enable them to:

• Apply scientific principles to climate change.

• Support arguments and explanations with multiple sources of relevant and valid evidence.

• Use and construct different models and apply them in appropriate situations to describe or illustrate climate change phenomena and interactions within a system.

• Identify and clarify questions about climate change and effects on earth’s oceans.

• Specify relationships between variables and decipher cause and effect relationships in a system.

What's in THE kit

The curriculum is divided into four coherent sections: engaging students in climate change, carbon emissions and human activity, making meaning through models, and working towards a solution. We recommend having a VEEP educator in to offer our Climate Modeling workshop to support this curriculum, but teachers can also borrow the 2 Earths climate model in addition if they wish to run this activity themselves.

View kit inventory 

Kit includes: IR thermometers, dual-temperature probes, heat lamps, Kill-a-Watt meters, a wide variety of materials for building models (flasks, beakers, sand, rocks, etc), Sea Level Rising board game, Material World book, and more. Click here to view the full Climate Change kit inventory. 

Kit size: Understanding & Engagement is 2 large plastic totes. Oceans, Ice, and Climate is 2 large totes. (2 Earths model/Modeling Climate Science is an additional tote)

WHAT IS NOT IN THE KIT

Alka seltzer (available for purchase at $10/class)

KIT COST: $60.00 

NGSS Standards Addressed

MS-ESS3-3 Earth and Human Activity: Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment.

MS-ESS3-4 Earth and Human Activity: Construct an argument supported by evidence for how increases in human population and per-capita consumption of natural resources impact Earth's systems. 

MS-ESS3-5 Earth and Human Activity: Ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperatures over the past century.