Introduction & Rationale
As a teacher, I am often part of discussions about whether to talk to students about climate change. Opponents of teaching climate change often argue that the topic is too depressing and overwhelming, and our students are too young to understand. I have been thinking about this over the past few months, and I agree that third-grade students are young, but I do not think they are too young to want to make sense of the world that they live in. I did a little math and it put the inaccuracy of this idea into perspective.
Think about this: In ten years my third graders will be young adults who will be graduating high school, ready to take on the world. They will be making their own decisions about housing, transportation, where to spend their money, and they will be both affecting and affected by climate change. They will decide what industry they want to work in, what they want to advocate for, what they value, and what type of person they want to be. Their contributions to our world will be crucial in the fight against climate change, but if we wait to start talking to them about it until it is less depressing and they are older, we might lose the opportunity for them to learn, and they may be influenced by misinformation found in popular sources. Climate change is urgent, and I argue that not discussing it with students will do more harm than good if lessons are done correctly. This generation of children will need accurate knowledge and an understanding of science to be able to make informed choices and be a force for change in our future.
My students are living with the reality of climate change and will face a future where many parts of their lives will be affected by climate change. They are the ones who will be our future engineers, scientists, biologists, and chemists who need to combat it and educate others about it. However, many of my third graders have misconceptions about what climate change is, how it is caused, and what we can do about it. I believe this partly comes from a lack of scientific knowledge about climate itself, and partly because they are sometimes given false or misleading information by adults.
Since I do teach third graders, I do not want to overwhelm them with too many catastrophic effects of climate change because it may make them feel apprehensive and detract from the science behind the lessons. I believe that talking about climate change on a global scale will also be too difficult for my students to grasp because they have not seen and do not interact with, say, polar bears at the North Pole and may feel helpless instead of motivated to affect change. To empower them as leaders who can help change something, I have decided that we will study climate change in the Great Lakes region with a focus on Chicago where we live (but this unit could be adapted for use in any community). We will learn about the effects that climate change is having and will have on Chicago in the future so, in ten years, these eight-year-olds will be knowledgeable adults who are empowered to make smart decisions about our planet.
For the past three years, I have noticed that my students’ knowledge of our place in the solar system, our geographic location, and climate change is inaccurate and insufficient. I am often surprised by my students identifying Minnesota as a country or Chicago as a state. I hope for this six-week unit to serve as a basic grounding for students to recognize and understand our place in space as well as our place on Earth. For students to fully understand climate change, its causes, and its effects, we will learn what climate is and review data to discover how it is changing. Only after we have learned this background knowledge about climate can we dive deeply into the realities of and solutions to climate change.
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