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<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>Hi Patrick, great choice of topic! Transport is such a brilliant, tangible angle for a Climate Detectives project because it’s something every single child experiences twice a day.</span>
<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>I really love how hands-on your plan is. Tying the investigation into maths and data handling—calculating class percentages, plotting graphs, and estimating actual carbon output—gives the whole thing real academic weight while keeping it totally accessible.</span>
<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>Your point about investigating the barriers to walking or cycling (like distance or safe footpaths) is spot on too. It keeps the project grounded and realistic. You could easily tie this into a Walk on Wednesday (WOW) initiative—where families who live too far to walk the whole way are encouraged to ‘park and stride’ by driving part of the way and walking the rest.</span>
<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>Presenting their findings and recommendations to your Green-Schools committee gives the kids’ research a proper, real-world audience and genuine purpose. Fantastic plan!</span>
Research Question:
How do different ground surfaces across our school affect local temperatures during hot summer spells, and how can green spaces help cool our school microclimate?
Class Reflection (incorporating the hot summer context)
To get pupils genuinely invested, I’d tie the project directly to their own recent experiences of the unusually hot summer weather across Ireland and Europe. The children have lived through the heat, hosepipe bans, and baked-dry lawns, making this the perfect hook for an investigation right on our doorstep.
We’d start with a guided walk around the school grounds, using basic IR thermometers (or just our hands) to compare how hot the black playground tarmac gets compared to shaded grass or under trees.
Using the Climate Detectives planner, I’d challenge them to connect our school yard to the wider picture: Why did our playground feel like an oven during the recent summer heatwave? What happens to temperatures when we swap concrete for grass or trees?
Pupils would work in ‘detective teams’ to log surface and air temperatures across different weather conditions, tracking how green spaces buffer against extreme heat. To give their enquiry real-world purpose, they’d present their findings to the school eco-committee or principal with practical proposals—like planting more trees or creating shaded seating—to help “future-proof” our schoolyard for upcoming hot summers.Hi Alyson,
I completeley agree with your take on Nose High Up in the Sky.
It Strikes a balance between active, hands on tasks and practical skill – building. Pairing children into small groups to work through the activities would really help with collaboration.
The ESA’s Nose Up High in the Sky is a really solid, practical resource for primary classes. After trying out the activities myself, I love how it builds up naturally—starting with basic sensory stuff like looking at cloud cover and testing weather proverbs, before moving on to actual data collection.
Building the DIY weather tools (like the plastic bottle rain gauges and cup anemometers) is a great way to get the engineering and craft side into a science lesson. Getting the kids to measure real rainfall and temperature gives them proper ownership of the results, rather than just reading numbers off a screen.
I’d definitely use this with my class. To build on it, I’d probably have them log their readings over a fortnight and plot them on line graphs to bring in more maths, then maybe compare our class results to online forecast averages. It’s a really handy, low-cost way to link daily weather tracking to bigger climate ideas.
Hi Niamh,
<p data-path-to-node=”0″>I loved your approach for the junior end! Starting with what “home” means to them before building up to habitats and the wider planet is such a gentle, natural way in. It keeps things accessible without frightening them.</p>
<p data-path-to-node=”1″>The survey idea is brilliant for weaving in maths and data handling, and getting them to write slogans gives them real ownership. It’s so crucial that young kids leave these lessons feeling empowered to take small actions rather than just feeling anxious, and your ideas strike that balance really well!</p>The documentary HOME is visually stunning and really drives home how human activity impacts the planet. The footage makes abstract global issues obvious right away, but showing the entire film would definitely overwhelm primary school kids given its length and the heavy focus on things like the origins of life.
I’d much rather use short 2–3 minute clips as visual hooks rather than playing the full film. Pairing those clips with the Paxi videos works really well, as Paxi breaks down the science behind greenhouse gases in a way that’s actually accessible for children.
To keep the lessons balanced and practical, I’d structure them like this:
Discussion: Start with brief snippets and ask simple, open questions like “What did you notice?” to draw out their initial thoughts without driving the narrative too much.
Local focus: Bring it back to their everyday lives by looking at recent local weather or checking out biodiversity around our own school grounds.
Action: Show clips of Greta Thunberg to kick off a class debate, then wrap up with a hands-on project—like appointing energy monitors or setting up a class compost bin—so they leave feeling empowered rather than anxious.<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>Hi Ailbhe, great points here. Using a KWL chart to see what they already know is such a handy starting point, especially since kids pick up so many random bits about climate change nowadays. I really like how you’re bringing in the human side of it too—showing how choices made in one country affect people elsewhere makes the topic way more real. Getting them to present at an assembly is a brilliant way to give their research a proper purpose as well! </span>
<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>Hi Eimear, Taking the kids out to look at the school’s solar panels first is a brilliant way to ground the topic in real life before diving into Paxi. I completely agree with you—the video is super engaging, but on its own, the greenhouse effect can be a bit abstract for middle classes. Your idea of using mini whiteboards to catch key vocab as it comes up is a great way to keep them focused, and getting them on Seesaw afterwards will really help anchor what they have learned. </span>
Activity 3 is a really strong combination. Paxi does a brilliant job of breaking down the greenhouse effect—it takes a tricky, abstract concept and makes it visual and easy for primary kids to grasp without bogging them down in heavy jargon.
Following the video with the temperature prediction tool works brilliantly to bring the tech and maths side into play. Being able to toggle different scenario sliders gives the children a proper sense of agency as they see how different emission levels directly tweak future temperatures. In my own classroom, I’d watch the video together on the board first to set the scene. Then I’d get the kids working in pairs on tablets to run ‘best-case’ versus ‘worst-case’ scenarios, logging their results on a quick record sheet.
Ideas for improvements:
Local context: The tool focuses heavily on global averages, but kids relate best to what’s right in front of them. It’d be great to add a quick discussion prompt linking those temperature rises to local issues like regional flooding, local wildlife habitats, or summer heatwaves.
Hands-on follow-up: To avoid ending the lesson on a bit of a downer about global warming, I’d throw in a small action task where they have to design a practical school eco-idea (like a scrap paper system or energy-saving monitors) to lower our own footprint.Activity 3 is a really strong combination. Paxi does a brilliant job of breaking down the greenhouse effect—it takes a tricky, abstract concept and makes it visual and easy for primary kids to grasp without bogging them down in heavy jargon.
Following the video with the temperature prediction tool works brilliantly to bring the tech and maths side into play. Being able to toggle different scenario sliders gives the children a proper sense of agency as they see how different emission levels directly tweak future temperatures. In my own classroom, I’d watch the video together on the board first to set the scene. Then I’d get the kids working in pairs on tablets to run ‘best-case’ versus ‘worst-case’ scenarios, logging their results on a quick record sheet.
Ideas for improvements:
Local context: The tool focuses heavily on global averages, but kids relate best to what’s right in front of them. It’d be great to add a quick discussion prompt linking those temperature rises to local issues like regional flooding, local wildlife habitats, or summer heatwaves.
Hands-on follow-up: To avoid ending the lesson on a bit of a downer about global warming, I’d throw in a small action task where they have to design a practical school eco-idea (like a scrap paper system or energy-saving monitors) to lower our own footprint.Hi Nessa, I also really loved your idea about checking the weather over four Mondays! It’s such a simple, practical way to get the kids spotting real patterns over time. Totally agree on the STEM points too—building that integrated approach in the classroom is something I’m definitely working on as well.
<p data-path-to-node=”0″>That’s a brilliant angle! Using the recent heatwave as a jumping-off point for Activity 1 is such a clever hook. Kids always engage so much more when you start with something they’ve actually lived through, and it’s a brilliant way to unpack any confusion between a hot spell and actual climate patterns.</p>
<p data-path-to-node=”1″>The long-term weather journal idea is fantastic. Having them keep track of data over time gives them real ownership of their learning, and letting them look back at their own records to spot trends brings in that maths and data side of STEM in a really natural way.</p>
<p data-path-to-node=”2″>I also really like how you’ve tied Activity 2 to everyday tech like car dashboards and home thermostats. It’s such a practical way to show them that data collection isn’t just something we do in school—it’s happening all around them. Sounds like a great setup for the term ahead!</p>Looking back at Liston’s (2018) paper was a handy reminder that proper STEM teaching isn’t just about running a quick science experiment and checking the box. It’s really about weaving science, tech, engineering, and maths together through genuine, hands-on learning. I’ll admit I often fall into the trap of leaning way too heavily on the science side of things in my own classroom, so these activities felt like a really practical way to balance things out.
For Activity 1 (Is it weather or climate?), I think it works as a great starter for ironing out misconceptions. The distinction between daily conditions and long-term climate is something my class regularly mixes up. I’d probably run this as a quick group card-sorting task on the carpet first. That gives the kids a chance to chat, debate their reasoning, and practice using the key terms before sitting down at their desks with the worksheet. If I were to tweak it to bring in more maths and tech, we could look up our local live forecast online and plot it on a graph next to the 30-year climate averages for our area.
Activity 2 (Weather Detectives) is a brilliant hook—children always respond well to anything framed as a puzzle or mystery. It gets them sifting through clues and picking out data patterns without feeling like they’re doing a dry data-handling exercise. To improve it and plug the missing engineering element, I’d extend the lesson by having the children design and build their own basic rain gauges or wind vanes using recycled plastic bottles and junk art bits.