In this activity, students develop concept maps of the carbon cycle through a die-rolling game that simulates carbon reservoirs and fluxes. By the end of this activity, students should be able to describe and explain how the carbon cycle has changed in the last 250 years.

Students will learn that there is a finite amount of carbon on earth, which moves around in the environment, from one place to another. Activity is scaleable from elementary to high school with options to introduce advanced content. Wrap up includes role playing the carbon cycle with the addition of human influences (e.g. burning of fossil fuels). Activity can be done in classroom or outside, includes working in a group and role playing. Grades 3-12. This resources is part of the Our Changing Ocean and Estuaries Series

In this activity, students use a physical model to learn the basics of photosynthesis and respiration within the carbon cycle.

In this activity, students work in groups, plotting carbon dioxide concentrations over time on overheads and estimating the rate of change over five years. Stacked together, the overheads for the whole class show an increase on carbon dioxide over five years and annual variation driven by photosynthesis. This exercise enables students to practice basic quantitative skills and understand how important sampling intervals can be when studying changes over time. A goal is to see how small sample size may give incomplete picture of data.

This interactive visualization explains the chemical relationship between carbon dioxide, shell building, and ocean acidification.

In this lesson, students calculate their own carbon footprint using Peter Kalmus's methodology in his book Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution.

Step 1 - Inquire: Students watch a short video on the climate crisis. Students engage in a brief discussion on the prompt "Do my individual actions matter?"

Step 2 - Investigate: Students calculate their own carbon footprints.

Step 3 - Inspire: Students engage in a discussion, reflecting on this activity and the importance of individual actions.

SYNOPSIS: This lesson shows that different foods have different environmental impacts. Students will calculate ratios and practice proportional thinking.

SCIENTIST NOTES: This lesson is thoroughly sourced. It is engaging and suitable for students to understand how to measure carbon footprint from food sources. The activities in the lesson would also enable them to build their quantitative skills to determine the extent of CO2 impact on the environment. The lesson has passed our science review, and it is advised for classroom use.

POSITIVES:
-This lesson is great because it shows that different foods have different environmental impacts.
-It shows the great disparity between certain types of foods. For example, creating 1 kg of beef (from a beef herd) emits 99.48 kgCO2eq. Creating 1 kg of potatoes creates only 0.46 kgCO2eq. Raising beef creates more than 200x the carbon dioxide than raising the same amount of potatoes!

ADDITIONAL PREREQUISITES:
-You will need to share the Student Slideshow with students and grant them editing rights. They will all be writing in the same slideshow.
-In general, animals and animal products use far more resources than plants.
-Kilograms are used in this lesson. Some students will be unfamiliar with this unit. You can read more about the kilogram at Britannica. An easy conversion from kilograms to pounds is 1 kg = 2.2 lbs.
-Kilograms of CO2 equivalent are also used in this lesson. This is pretty abstract for the students. You can have them imagine holding a 2.2-pound ball in their hands. This ball has mass and takes up space. This is the "pollution" generated when creating different foods.

DIFFERENTIATION:
-You can create groups of students with mixed abilities.
-If a group finishes early, you can ask these extension questions:
-"Food 1’s emissions are what % of food 2’s emissions?"
-"Can you convert your answers from kilograms to pounds?"
-The Investigate section features a completed table of calculations. You can use this before the students begin their calculations. You can also share this with certain students or groups and let other groups complete their calculations on their own. Another option is to have students use the completed table to check their thinking when they are finished. There is a walkthrough of calculations in the speaker notes of this slide.

This video features a number of different climate scientists describing the effects of the increasing amount of carbon dioxide on global climate and proposing a series of solutions to mitigate these effects. Video addresses health problems and other costs to humans associated with climate change.

Students play the role of carbon atoms to learn about the carbon cycle and how it is changing. Students create two carbon cycle diagramsâvisual models of the cycle before and after the Industrial Revolution. They reflect on the game and how scientists believe humans are impacting this critical Earth system.

This series of two lessons uses cutting-edge scientific research on the effects of climate change on communities in the intertidal. Through a combination of a dynamic presentation and several videos, students are introduced to the effects of climate change on the ocean (ocean acidification and temperature increase) and what is known about how ocean organisms are affected. Then students read and interpret graphs and construct a scientific explanation based on data from this research.

In this activity, student teams research and develop a proposal to decrease the carbon footprint of their city's/town's public transportation system and then prepare a report that explains why their transportation plan is the best for their community.

This game is an expansion on the popular board game Catan, it adapts the regular Catan game to become a game about sustainability and climate change. It's a neat idea, but teachers must already own the game and know how to play it.

This game-based learning would be great for after-school activities, environmental clubs, or a 'free' period in school. The amount of setup needed to get the game going and explain the rules may be too involved for regular classroom use.

Students model the effect of greenhouse gases on Earth's atmosphere. They find that greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, are uniquely shaped to catch and pass on infrared radiation, and so they are responsible for the warmth we enjoy on Earth. The children discuss how the addition of greenhouse gases by human activities leads to further warming and what steps we can take to slow it.

This activity engages learners in exploring the impact of climate change on arctic sea ice in the Bering Sea. They graph and analyze sea ice extent data, conduct a lab on thermal expansion of water, and then observe how a scientist collects long-term data on a bird population.

Students run a simplified computer model to explore how climate conditions can affect caribou, the most abundant grazing animal in the Arctic.

This animation illustrates how the hardiness zones for plants have changed between 1990 and 2006 based data from 5,000 National Climatic Data Center cooperative stations across the continental United States.

In this activity, students research changes to the environment in the Arctic/Bering Sea over time using oral and photographic histories. Developed for Alaska Native students, this activity can be customized for other regions.

Key figure from the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that shows changes in global average surface temperature, global average sea level, and Northern Hemisphere snow cover from as far back as 1850.

This video looks at the impact of changing climate on animal habitats around the world, showing how different creatures are responding to changing temperatures and precipitation patterns.