Science 101

Meeting Needs for Survival

In this edition of Tech Talk, climate education is addressed with two engaging digital resources: the Maine Online Open-Source Education (MOOSE) Climate Education Module and Google Earth. Climate education resources for elementary students, specifically K-2, that are developmentally appropriate are few and far between but two apps stand out. The MOOSE Climate Education Module MOOSE is progressive in both content and curricular design, integrating time SEL elements to support young learners. While designed for use by Maine educators with their students, the site offers content relevant to students from all regions. MOOSE resources are organized into a developmentally appropriate and compelling learning progression connecting directly to the lives of Mainers. Google Earth is now available through a web interface but it still has that terrific "wow" factor we have come to know and love. The resource is a powerful tool for applications across the curriculum including science and climate education in particular. In this issue, learn of ideas for building student skills in key digital literacy competencies while engaging students in a tailored and impactful learning experience.

In an age where catastrophic damage from climate-related events circulates through social and print media, it is important to build communities of hope for our elementary students (Hestness, et al., 2019, Sanchez, et al., 2021). Climate justice education is a vehicle for creating hope and building strong, resilient communities where students are empowered to act for themselves and their natural surroundings (Svarstad, 2021). Local phenomena can be leveraged to engage elementary students in civic responsibility and science and engineering practices, inspiring students to take action through proposing solutions to their community (Coleman, et al., 2019). We engage urban elementary students in a year-long place-based experiential learning centered on a student-driven local phenomenon. This project situates students as scientists collecting data and evidence to develop claims and argue from evidence regarding bird structures and their survival built and green environments. Students create authentic relationships with nature, rectifying the unjust relationships from past practices that contribute to environmental degradation of local communities (Gardiner, 2011). Climate justice is served as students use their voices for themselves, for the environment, and for the future of the planet they will inhabit.

Current and future Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine (STEMM) students must grapple with one of the most pressing scientific issues of the century: climate change. Teaching about climate change with our youngest learners requires preparation, planting roots to foster growth, innovation, and sustainability. Building a community garden with elementary students is a way to act towards climate justice as it reminds us about how all living things are part of an interconnected system. This paper describes a fifth-grade climate change action project that was part of a unit that aligns with the state science standards and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), focused on how science learning can be used to protect the Earth’s resources and local environments. The anchoring phenomenon and lessons of the unit highlighted the annual migration of the monarch butterflies, a local endangered species and phenomenon. By planting milkweed in the garden, students learned about migration, life cycles, greenhouse gasses and the survival of monarch butterflies. This article provides educators with ideas and practical suggestions for building a garden and an overview of how the project can be implemented within a school community.

Community resources offer extensions of early science learning that can deepen connections to the local ecosystem. This column offers ideas to extend early childhood classroom science through community mapping.

Climate education in elementary grades offers a chance to teach climate science, to help students understand how serious climate change is, to focus on ecosystems and global social systems, and to work toward justice-oriented solutions. This article describes the work of nearly 70 fourth grade bilingual students, their teachers and librarian, and support from multiple community volunteers to investigate persistent problems of flooding in local waterways. Children did not study flooding as an abstract concept; instead, they approached their study of flood mitigation as civic actors whose research and voices matter for shaping public policy for their community. Over the course of a school year, children worked with teams of educators and community volunteers in a weekly science and civic engagement unit focused on connecting with the waterways and ecosystems that experience frequent and sometimes devastating flooding. During this unit of study, children made sense of flooding, the role that adaptation and mitigation can play in resilient responses to climate change, and the role that their voices can play as civic actors whose input is meaningful for shaping civic decisions not in the future as adults but now as children who have a stake in how their community functions.

Children experience and grapple with the ongoing effects of climate change in their daily lives. While they did not cause climate change nor should they have to solve it, children deserve educational opportunities to understand why and how it occurs as they prepare to address it. In this Methods and Strategies article, we share how children engaged in place-based art, science, and literacy activities designed to support them in further cultivating relationships with their ecological community and to communicate their findings with other children engaging in the same process across the three coastal communities of Boston, Toronto, and San Diego. Specifically, we highlight how crafting representations of their noticings and wonderings from family walks in their ecological communities supported children to analyze the interactions within ecosystems and express concern and care for the natural world as they engaged in the science practice of asking questions. We share how elementary teachers can support children in cultivating relationships with their local community as they make observations and ask questions to understand how climate change impacts their ecological communities.

Teaching resources from the Library of Congress

An interview with metallurgical engineer Wendi Cooksey