Classroom Activities

Resilience planning is an important way that communities prepare for changes that are the result of natural disasters and climate change. This activity helps students understand how vulnerability and risk are assessed, which is an important first step in resilience planning.

Students investigate some of the ways carbon dioxide gets into and out of the atmosphere, and how this process affects our global climate.

Outdoors on a sunny, warm day, students explore how areas in the shade and light colors remain a bit cooler than areas in the sunshine and dark colors. Then they apply what they’ve learned to design a shade structure that will keep a playground cooler during hot summer days.  

Students use a card sort activity to explore different actions we can take to reduce the risks of climate change and learn to recognize different types of climate solutions: mitigations and adaptations.

Students analyze the energy consumption of a household appliance and estimate the amount of carbon dioxide it is adding to the atmosphere each year.

Project Resilience is a 20-day high school curriculum that helps students examine the environmental challenges facing communities along the Gulf of Mexico and learn about resilience planning using a resilience planning toolkit.

Students use information from Project Drawdown to learn about the sectors where climate solutions are being implemented to help slow down climate warming. Students construct a plan for using specific solutions to reduce and remove the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and make a claim describing how their plan could work to keep global temperature change below 1.5 °C .

Students learn how making changes to our environment can help keep people safe and reduce the impacts of weather hazards as they explore a human-built pond that is sometimes dry and sometimes filled with floodwater. 

Through a simple online model, students learn about the relationship between average global temperature and carbon dioxide emissions while predicting temperature change over the 21st Century.

Students consider how trees and forests are part of a solution to climate change by calculating the amount of carbon stored in a nearby tree and evaluating climate solutions that involve trees.