Teaching Climate

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

Students observe cloud type and coverage, as well as other weather conditions over a five-day period and correlate these observations. Students make and test predictions using these observations.

In this lab activity, students investigate how to prepare a biofuel source for conversion to a combustible product. The activity models how raw materials are refined to process liquid fuels.

This activity introduces students to plotting and analyzing phenology data. Students use 30 years of data that shows the date of the first lilac bloom and the number of days of ice cover of nearby Gull Lake.

This activity comes at the beginning of a sequence of activities in an energy module. Students observe the transfer of solar energy to different appliances with a solar cell and then they investigate the effect of using different solar sources to supply energy to appliances.

In this activity, students reconstruct past climates using lake varves as a proxy to interpret long-term climate patterns. Students use data from sediment cores to understand annual sediment deposition and how it relates to weather and climate patterns.

Students are charged with thinking about what it takes to 'do science'. They are introduced to the science of dendrochronology and learn how tree-ring science is executed.

In this activity students work with data to analyze local and global temperature anomaly data to look for warming trends. The activity focuses on the Great Lakes area.

This lesson sequence guides students to learn about the geography and the unique characteristics of the Arctic, including vegetation, and people who live there. Students use Google Earth to explore the Arctic and learn about meteorological observations in the Arctic, including collecting their own data in hands-on experiments. This is the first part of a three-part curriculum about Arctic climate.

This video is simple in its appearance, but it contains a wealth of relevant information about global climate models.