Teaching Climate

This two-part lab series from the US Ice Drilling Program teaches students about the process of science. It supports an understanding of how scientists use direct and indirect measurements to gain insight into natural phenomena. Students are asked to graph and analyze data, draw conclusions, and create mathematical models.

This resource outlines an engaging role-play activity in which students apply knowledge of wildfire mitigation, preparedness, and resilience to planning for community wildfire preparedness. The game also includes content related to the mental health impacts of wildfire, multicultural needs and responses, and housing availability and affordability.

This activity provides information on how to access and use a wealth of data and tools from NOAA to analyze climate through time. A video tutorial and background information are provided and show students how to interact with and use tools to analyze temperature and precipitation data for specific cities, states, countries, and the world.

This activity focuses on cloud identification and art. It combines art and science and uses art history to help students in their observations and cloud descriptions.

This resource from Boston University includes an informational animation with text to demonstrate the changes in prime movers of electricity generation in the United States between 1891 and 2021. The information is related back to the feasibility of certain prime movers that are used today.

This activity asks students to identify the best locations for wind farms based on the connection between surface roughness and wind speed. Students are directed to use a data tool called Global Wind Atlas to identify optimal locations for wind farms.

This website focuses on Ojibwe wild rice harvesting (manoomin). It is a celebration of the historical practice of wild rice harvesting, why it is so important to Ojibwe life, and how climate change can impact this resource. The topic is explained well, in-depth and there is a supplemental video and other topics you can explore.

In this lesson, students will watch videos and analyze data to understand how choices made today will affect the extent of global climate change and the impacts felt throughout the world. Then, students will develop a climate change action plan for their community.

In this video, learn how John Tyndall designed an experiment to reveal evidence that carbon dioxide traps heat. Teachers could use this resource to consider the role carbon dioxide plays in regulating Earth's temperature and its relationship to current trends in global warming.

This video discusses the fossil fuel fingerprint in isotopic analysis of atmospheric carbon dioxide. It does an excellent job of presenting this topic, which is too often overlooked in other discussions of the evidence for anthropogenic global warming.