Healthy Habitats: Climate Change Action for K-2
This resource began in response to elementary educators telling Climate Generation staff that they want to teach about climate change, but feel they don’t have the knowledge or resources to do so effectively. We wanted a resource that reflected elementary educators’ and students’ needs; and who better to connect with than those working in the classroom? We put out a call to find elementary educators with an interest in climate change education. Climate Generation selected three stellar educators working in different parts of the US to collaborate in developing and writing this curriculum.
In this resource, students will explore their local schoolyard habitat; reflect on how climate change may be impacting their habitat; and work together to plan and implement an action that helps reduce local climate impacts and cultivate climate resiliency at their school.
K-2 climate change education can provide foundational concepts that will support students’ climate literacy in future years! Activities like making observations and collecting data are necessary building blocks for students to later explore climate change in depth. And the scaffolding goes beyond science and math concepts; socio-emotional learning skills are also foundational to climate literacy. Students need to develop empathy for living beings, practice caring for others, and recognize that there is unfairness in how people live and are treated in order to develop a complex systems-level view of climate justice and to understand the issues on local, national, and global scales.
This resource is made up of three lessons which are designed to build off of one another. You will need to complete all three lessons in order to cover how habitats and climate change are connected in a way that is cohesive and supportive of students’ mental health. The lessons should be taught sequentially.
