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Hi Shane. I really enjoyed reading your post – you have some brilliant ideas. I really love the idea of getting the children to close their eyes and listen to the video for 5 minutes – this would act as a brilliant catalyst for a lesson on climate change and would be great for sparking debate. This would appeal brilliantly to auditory learners. I also love the collaborative nature of getting the children to work together in groups to brainstorm solutions for protecting our planet. The bottle cap idea for creating environmental murals is brilliant and so creative – it would really help develop children’s critical thinking, problem-solving and communication skills in a fun and active way.
The Paxi video explains greenhouse gases and climate change in a very child-friendly manner. It would act as a great prompt for a lesson, and could be used as a starting point to elicit the children’s prior knowledge on the topic. A KWL chart could be made through engaging the children in whole-class discussion. The children could predict what they think the climate might be like in the future by working in groups to discuss changing temperatures, precipitation and CO2 levels. They could then use the TEAL Tool to see how accurate their predictions were, and to collaboratively develop a climate report for a year in the future (each group could be assigned different years to investigate). The children could be given the option to record their climate reports on video, audio, in interview format, as a Powerpoint presentation etc to suit individual learning styles. The children would then listen to each other’s climate reports and provide feedback in the form of 2 stars and a wish.
Hi Amelia. I love your idea of getting the children to record climate news segments on their iPads. It would provide a fun and active way for the children to engage with their learning and would be great for developing their STEM skills. Listening to each other’s reports would act as a way of consolidating their learning. They could even use Green Screens on their iPads to make their videos look more impressive and professional!
Hi Katie,
I love the idea of setting up a school weather station – this would be a brilliant way of getting other classes involved in the activity. Perhaps older classes could get involved with helping younger classes in helping them to make and use anemometers etc. I like all the cross-curricular links that you made, and the idea of making school newsletters and display boards. The children would enjoy playing an active role in designing these, perhaps even making a weather blog for the school website.
The paper by Liston (2018) explains the importance of children developing their creativity, problem-solving, critical thinking and communication skills through STEM-based lessons. These STEM skills would be used and developed in both Activities 1 and 2. In Activity 1 of the ‘Weather vs Climate’ resources, I like the collaborative approach taken in getting children to work in pairs to discuss if each statement refers to weather or climate. Perhaps for writing the definition of weather and climate they could use iPads to research these definitions. For Activity 2, I love the investigative nature of getting children to measure and record air temperatures. This activity develops children’s critical thinking and communication skills by getting them to think about and discuss all the different factors that need to be considered when measuring and recording temperatures each day. This activity could be extended further by getting children to analyse wind speed and getting them to design and create their own anenometers.