Climate Resources for Teachers

Climate Health Resources for Teachers and Others

Our members have found some of these free and easily available resources to be useful. Please share with us any others you have come across which might also be of use.

• NASA has a variety of free resources for kids including games, activities, short videos and thought-provoking questions on weather, climate and climate change. Most are aimed at upper elementary through middle school but may be adaptable to high school as well.

  • https://climatekids.nasa.gov/

• NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab provides free lessons, problem sets and activities for students at all levels from K-12.

  • https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/tag/search/Climate+Change

• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offers free webinars on teaching about climate as well as case studies, videos, demonstrations, interactive simulations and experiments. Primarily for middle school, high school and beyond.

  • https://www.climate.gov/teaching

• The National Wildlife Federation offers Eco-Schools, which has a curriculum for K-12 and a program to audit and certify how green your own school is. Over 5000 schools in the US have signed up. Only part of it is climate-specific but that part is well integrated into an overall program of awareness and advocacy for kids. NWF also offers a YouTube channel plus Ranger Rick and Ranger Rick, Jr magazines.  https://www.nwf.org/eco-schools-usa

• From the BBC, a 9 minute video on Why have politicians done so little to stop climate change? Briefly introduces the political history of climate issues and why there has been so little progress over the decades people have known about this world-wide life-threatening crisis. https://cdn.espresso.economist.com/files/public/CLIMATECHANGEFILMSUBS.mp4

• From Stanford University, check out these lesson plans for middle school and high school about the changes in the local ecology as noticed by long-term residents, and how to engage your students interviewing people about the changes they observed over the years. Your students’ interviews can be posted onto the site as well.

  • https://landtalk.stanford.edu/lessons/

• From the University of Cambridge, UK, is a free, downloadable set of lesson plans focusing on water resources, climate change impact on water resources, weather forecasting and related topics, for lower elementary through high school students. Their unit was developed to focus on climate and water issues in the Himalayas but is useful for other areas as well.

  • https://thehearthadvisors.com/our-work/our-services/pani-pahar-the-water-curriculum/

• Yale Program on Climate Change Communication has US maps which allow you to click on a state, region, or congressional district and see what popular opinion is in those areas regarding belief in global warming and support for various public policy actions. This data was collected in the spring of 2019. https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/ycom-us/

• National Public Radio has a thoughtful article about teaching climate awareness at any grade level - see https://www.npr.org/2019/04/25/716359470/eight-ways-to-teach-climate-change-in-almost-any-classroom

• Additional teacher resources are available at the nonprofit Center for Climate and Energy Solutions at https://www.c2es.org/content/teacher-resources/

• A variety of resources and information on adaptation to climate change are available at the nonprofit Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange’s website https://www.cakex.org/

• Here are two fun calculators for students:

  • Calculate your closet’s carbon footprint

  • Calculate the carbon footprint of some favorite meals

• Researchers at MIT along with some allies have put together an easy climate-change tool for your students to play with En-ROADS Climate Solutions Simulator – it has some fun graphs based on status quo which your future voters and policy analysts can change to see how different assumptions about worldwide GDP, carbon prices, energy efficiency and new technologies change greenhouse gas and global temperatures.

• Kid’s Interactive Games - Drawdown, Act Up!

  A variety of games for elementary and older children designed to be fun but also create a structure to discuss some of the issues of climate change. These creative activities were designed by Inside the Greenhouse at the University of Colorado

• Games for older students - Check out https://survivethecentury.net/ for a free Choose-Your-Adventure style interactive exercise for High School and older. You are the editor of a local newspaper and can support a choice of editorial recommendations which all lead to different outcomes. Which will you choose, and what are the outcomes of each? Will society survive your choices till the end of the century? Fun for teens and adults.

• Build Climate Awareness through Humor and Theater

  Inside the Greenhouse at the University of Colorado also provides a series of short videos (mostly 1-3 minutes) with students acting out short skits combining humor with a serious point about climate-related issues. Use as is, or use these as examples to inspire your own students to create and act out their own performances! https://insidethegreenhouse.org/media

• The nonprofit One Tree Planted offers this fun quiz about the role trees play in climate health. For middle schoolers through adults.

• For the advanced climate nerds among us, take this 5 question quiz and see if you can beat Bill Gates’ score!

  https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Climate-change-quiz (Note - I didn’t!)