Climate Crisis Classroom

Each year in social studies, my students get to study an aspect of world geography. This year, we will focus our geography studies on the climate crisis by applying it to the five themes of geography: Location, Place, Human-Environment Interaction, Movement, and Region. This will allow us to study how the current problems of climate crisis affect the makeup of countries, culture, migration patterns, and more. We will also study current legislation in both the United States and other countries as a way to explore potential solutions. In addition, I will work with my student's math, communication arts, and science teachers to connect the climate crisis to their study in other classes. We will calculate the percentage of CO2 contributed by various countries, read nonfiction texts on the climate crisis, and learn how and why the climate crisis is occuring. Our students will use this information to write persuasive letters and essays advocating for the changes they wish to see. Further, this project will push my students to educate their community. Students will create an individual brochure that includes art, writing, maps, and charts to pull together their information on the climate crisis and advocate for a piece of legislation, theory, or practice we have studied. Because this project is extensive, I will offer an after-school program for students to continue learning and work on their projects together. During this program, we would explore our own projects as well as an extra-credit project to turn our school green. This will allow my students to master the content of the climate crisis while still following our standards-based geography curriculum.