In this activity, students investigate the shifting of three penguin communities in response to climate change.
Our project involves students learning about the values of a natural area in their community and producing a public service announcement and map to show its value and how it could be developed.
This performance assessment aligns with NGSS Performance Expectation 4.LS1.1 and is intended to be used as an interim assessment. These assessments can either be used summatively, as an end of learning activity, or formatively, utilizing student responses to identify next instructional steps.
This performance assessment aligns with NGSS Performance Expectation 5.LS2.1 and is intended to be used as an interim assessment. These assessments can either be used summatively, as an end of learning activity, or formatively, utilizing student responses to identify next instructional steps.
Learn how snowfall happening later in the year than usual is impacting cultural practices in this video segment about climate change adapted from the College of Menominee Nation.
In this video segment adapted from the College of Menominee Nation, tribal members observe lower water levels in lakes and streams and call for global, collaborative solutions to address climate change.
This NOAA video discusses how the ocean absorbs the increased amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, thereby changing the pH and buffering action of the ocean. These changes in pH are impacting calcifying organisms, such as corals and shellfish, and related food chains and ecosystems.
The Ocean Health Index is a new, comprehensive measure of the ocean’s overall condition – one that treats people and nature as integrated parts of a healthy system. The ocean touches nearly every aspect of our lives – making it essential to the economic, social, and ecological well-being of everyone, everywhere. Evaluated globally and by country, the Ocean Health Index presents 10 public goals that represent the wide range of benefits that a healthy ocean provides to people. Each country’s overall score is the average of its 10 goal scores. Overall scores and individual goal scores are directly comparable between all countries. All scores range from 0 to 100.
400 million tons of plastic is produced every year, 36% of which is designed for single use or packaging. Of that number, only 9% is recycled. It’s fair to say that plastics are everywhere, including the ocean. In fact, approximately 13 million tons of plastic enters oceanic currents annually. Plastic has become a pillar of modern life. It’s going to take a deep, transformational change in humanity’s consciousness and activities regarding the ocean to break the plastic pattern.
We believe this is possible! But we need your help. By relating socio-economic and scientific concepts such as watershed and ocean currents, food chain interactions, and the greenhouse gas effect, youth will learn the history of plastic, how it transformed our consumer habits, how it harms ocean health, exacerbates the current climate crisis, and how they can protect our ocean from further plastic pollution and restore the ecosystems already affected.
Through this education kit’s activities, students will be given the knowledge, tools, and skills to break their plastic pattern and become leaders of change – and this all starts in your classroom.
This unit allows students to investigate past changes in Earth's climate. Students first explore relationships in climate data such as temperature, solar radiation, carbon dioxide, and biodiversity. They then investigate solar radiation in more depth to learn about changes over time such as seasonal shifts. Students then learn about mechanisms for exploring past changes in Earth's climate such as ice cores, tree rings, fossil records, etc. Finally, students tie all these together by considering the feedbacks throughout the Earth system and reviewing an article on a past mass extinction event.
The purpose of this resource is to help students understand the connection between remote sensing, computer imagery, and land cover assessment. Students translate their maps created in the beginning activity into digital code and exchange the digitized versions of their maps with students in another school.
The purpose of this resource is to familiarize students with the importance of perspective and various scales of remotely sensed data. Students create a 3-D model of an area and develop a classification system for the landforms in their model. The maps can then be used to answer certain questions about the environment.
The purpose of this resource is to familiarize students with modeling as it relates to remote sensing and digitized images. Students will use the symbolic map created in the beginning activity to produce a digitized image and begin to see why ground verification of satellite data is necessary.
This lesson guides a student inquiry into properties of the ocean's carbonate buffer system, and how changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels may affect ocean pH and biological organisms that depend on calcification.
This video adapted from KTOO explores the impact of oil contamination on the herring population of Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1999, 10 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
This narrated slide show gives a brief overview of coral biology and how coral reefs are in danger from pollution, ocean temperature change, ocean acidification, and climate change. In addition, scientists discuss how taking cores from corals yields information on past changes in ocean temperature.
In this video segment adapted from the Yukon River Panel, visit fishing communities along the Yukon River and see how Alaska Native peoples exercise stewardship of salmon to ensure that it remains a central food source and cultural touchstone.
Against the backdrop of the devastating 1930's Dust Bowl, this video segment adapted from Interactive NOVA profiles an organic farmer and the techniques he uses to conserve topsoil.
This 3-part interactive and virtual lab activity examines the life cycle of the sea urchin, and how the increasing acidity of the ocean affects their larval development.
This activity is a field investigation where students will make observations on a chosen location every two weeks for the period of one school year. They will record their observations using a digital camera and a nature journal.