SYNOPSIS: In this lesson, students explore critical media literacy and begin creating their advertisements.

SCIENTIST NOTES: This lesson lets students understand the implication of advertisement in influencing green transportation. It is suitable to engage students to create advertisements so as to influence the adoption of green public transportation. All accompanying materials used in the lesson have been verified and validated. On that account, this lesson is recommended for teaching.

POSITIVES:
-This lesson features critical media literacy, an important skill for all students.
-This lesson supports collaboration amongst peers.
-Students explore real-world problems through project-based learning.

ADDITIONAL PREREQUISITES:
-This is lesson 5 of 6 in our 3rd-5th grade Green Transportation unit.
-The videos on slides 13-15 will automatically start and stop at the appropriate times.
-Students should understand how to read a rubric and use it as a guide for increasing their scores.
-The final lesson in this unit plan does not allow any more class time for students to create their advertisements. After this class is over, you could allow more class time for advertisement creation or ask students to finish their advertisements outside of class.

DIFFERENTIATION:
-You can break down the definition of critical media literacy.
-You can allot multiple days following this lesson for advertisement creation time based on students' needs.
-Some students may be using different technologies to create their advertisements (e.g., TikTok, Adobe Spark, Canva, etc.). It may take those students longer to finish their advertisements if they are also learning a new technology.

SYNOPSIS: This lesson features the final advertisement presentations and provides students with the opportunity to think about how to use these projects to make an impact in real life.

SCIENTIST NOTES: The lesson gives students a chance to reflect on the power of advertisement and ways to engage the public to use the metro as a sustainable green transportation model. The materials used in the lesson have been verified and are accurate. Hence, this lesson is recommended for classroom use.

POSITIVES:
-Students explore real-world problems through project-based learning.
-Students practice oral presentation skills.
-Students practice giving constructive feedback to their peers.
-This lesson empowers students to continue their projects after the allotted class time has ended.

ADDITIONAL PREREQUISITES:
-This is lesson 6 of 6 in our 3rd-5th grade Green Transportation unit.
-You can review a code of conduct or guidelines for oral presentations prior to this lesson. This can include an introduction for how to be a prepared speaker and active listener.

DIFFERENTIATION:
-You may scaffold reflection questions with sentence frames.
-You can decide on alternative ways to conduct student presentations based on students' needs.
-Potential action projects for students are listed on slide 14 of the teacher slideshow.

This lesson will introduce students to plastics and microplastics, allowing them to identify various categories of microplastics and how they can reduce the amount of plastic that is used. Students will learn how the consumption of plastics impacts the environment.

Our modern world uses many different materials, often complexly constructed and difficult to recycle. Students investigate the elements in a smartphone and innovations in cement and steel. They also consider the challenge of communicating about large and complex numbers. This guide an extension of the TILclimate episode "TIL about materials."

This NASA animation shows the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide over different time scales. Viewers can compare the last 400,000 years, last 1000 years, and last 25 years. The data come from the Lake Vostok ice cores (400,000 BC to about 4000 BC), Law Dome ice cores (1010 AD to 1975 AD) and Mauna Loa observations (1980 to 2005).

Students learn about life-cycle assessment and how engineers use this technique to determine the environmental impact of everyday products and processes. As they examine what’s involved in making and consuming cupcakes, a snack enjoyed by millions of people every year, students learn about the production, use and disposal phases of an object’s life cycle. With the class organized into six teams, students calculate data for each phase of a cupcake’s life cycle—wet ingredients, dry ingredients, baking materials, oven baking, frosting, liner disposal—and calculate energy usage and greenhouse gases emitted from making one cupcake. They use ratios and fractions, and compare options for some of the life-cycle stages, such as different paper wrapper endings (disposal to landfills or composting) in order to make a life-cycle plan with a lower environmental impact. This activity opens students’ eyes to see the energy use in the cradle-to-grave lives of everyday products. Pre/post-quizzes, worksheets, activity cards, Excel® workbook and visual aids are provided.

At the end of a six-week class or unit on global warming, students role-play representatives from various countries and organizations at an international summit on global warming.

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This is a version of the UN climate mock negotiations exercise developed by Shangrila Joshi Wynn.

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In this activity, students will use actual CO2 data from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii to create their own "Keeling Curve"; conduct an analysis of the data; and, attempt to match it to a mathematical function. They will then use the function to predict increases in CO2, both historical and future.

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Prior to this lab, students will have read and learned about valley glacier processes, glacier mass balance, warm-based and cold-based glaciers, and can identify various glacier landforms formed by erosion. They will also have had an introductory lecture on ice physics, but that is not necessary to complete this activity.

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Understanding global climate change is challenging, even for adults, yet having an understanding of this topic is consequential for the future. In this activity, middle school students learn about global climate change using models that allow them to make predictions, observations, and then explain mechanisms for climate change. Component ideas include change over time, deep time, and accumulation. Students are asked to act as advisers on how to lower energy use, and refine their understanding of how and why this is important, before testing their ideas and finally revising their advice.

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In this activity, students pose several hypotheses for what will happen if you continue heating or supplying energy to the hot and cold planet models (Mercury, Mars, Venus, and Earth) and then test their hypotheses using a spreadsheet based radiation balance model. The activity supports investigation of a real world challenge, experimenting with life support conditions for Mars at an Arctic outpost. The interactive model runs are conducted using a Java applet. This resource includes student worksheets, assessment questions and a teacher's guide. This is Activity B in module 2, Modeling hot and cold planets, of the resource, Earth Climate Course: What Determines a Planet's Climate? The course aims to help students to develop an understanding of our environment as a system of human and natural processes that result in changes that occur over various space and time scales.

This video is simple in its appearance, but it contains a wealth of relevant information about global climate models.

This set of activities is about carbon sources, sinks, and fluxes among them - both with and without anthropogenic components.

This hands-on activity demonstrates and explains the reasons for the seasons caused by the tilt of Earth on its axis as it orbits around the sun.

In this activity, students compare carbon dioxide data from Mauna Loa Observatory, Barrow, Alaska, and the South Pole over the past 40 years. Students use the data to learn about what causes short-term and long-term changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide. This activity makes extensive use of Excel.

In this mini-module, students are introduced to the mechanisms of the African monsoon and explore the relationship between climate feedback and changes to the monsoon. It concludes with an illustration of how those changes are affecting the people who live there and generating political instability.

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This Motions of the Sun Lab is an interactive applet from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Astronomy Applet project.

Climate change adaptation isn’t always welcome as a topic of conversation, even among those who could benefit from it. A recent study hints at a possible path forward.

This video gives an insight into the reasons why, once again, the poorest are suffering the most from the consequences of climate change. At the same time, it shows how more and more people are joining forces to tackle this injustice and stand firm against the biggest perpetrators of climate catastrophes.