5 WOW Ideas for Your Climate Change Lesson Plan

Are you creating your climate change lesson plan and needing some ideas or even encouragement? Climate change is one of those topics that is required for many state standards, but there are some strong feelings tied to it.

As a teacher, you are supposed to teach the standards and the facts, but that can be very interesting.

So, here’s a little background:

• In the atmosphere, there are gases, called greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, water, and methane, that capture heat and maintain temperature.
• Greenhouse gases help to keep heat from escaping to outer space.
• The Earth needs a balance of these greenhouse gases to maintain the right temperature.
• Scientists have noticed a rise in the average global temperature, by a little more than 1°C, since 1880.
• This gradual increase of the overall temperature is called global warming or climate change.

Many scientists believe that the climate is changing much faster than normal due to human activity, releasing extra greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This causes the Earth to get warmer.

Most scientists agree on these three facts, although there is some debate with other data.

1. concentration of carbon dioxide (CO₂) has been rising for several decades
2. temperatures have risen over the past few centuries, since around 1850
3. CO₂ acts as a greenhouse gas; capable of raising the temperatures

So, as long as you teach these items, you are teaching facts. I also think that you should allow students to explore why it’s such a debated topic, why there is bias in some areas, and why some scientists question the data.

In this post, I share some WOW factor ideas to teach about climate change! I first share some WONDER activities to get students excited about learning this topic. Then, I share some ways to help students dive into this topic without getting overwhelmed. Finally, I share some WIDEN activities that allow students to dive deeper into the content.

Tasked with making a detailed lesson plan on climate change? I got you, just read below! Let bring on the WOW Factor!

Hooks for Your Lesson Plan for Climate Change

Whether you call them hooks or WONDER strategies, these are the activities that spark excitement and get your students eager to learn about a topic.. With this being such a controversial topic, you want to make sure each and every student feels comfortable and open-minded before starting the lesson.

These are also great to see “where your students are at” when it comes to climate change. What do they know? What else do they need to learn?

Here are two ideas for your WONDER activities.

Art Pre-assessment

This is a fun climate change classroom activity!

Allow your students to express their feelings and thoughts about climate change by drawing a sketch.

1. Give your students a sheet of white paper or allow them to get out a piece of paper of their own.
2. Tell your students that they have 10 minutes (set a timer) to draw a picture that shows what they think climate change is, how it makes them feel, and any causes or effects that come to mine.

There is no right or wrong answer! You can allow students to share out after the 10 minutes is over.

You can collect these or walk around the room to observe them as students are drawing them. This is a great way for students to give their opinions about this topic before diving into the lesson.

Modeling the Greenhouse Effect

Another thing that you can do to get your students thinking about the greenhouse effect and its impact on our Earth is to model it! It helps the concept make more sense to students.

You can do this in three ways.

1. Show a video to your students that shows this model and have a discussion before, during, and afterward. Here are some examples that you can show your students. Here is one by the Dawood Foundation. Here is another example by Erik Christensen. Of course, I also have to add this example by Spangler Science!
2. You can show your own demo. You can get some ideas from the videos above, but some simple materials you’ll need are two clear plastic bottles, thermometers, corks for the bottles, Alka Seltzer tablets or baking soda and vinegar (something to create carbon dioxide), a funnel, and two heat lamps.
   • You’ll stick the thermometers in the cork (2). You’ll then stick the corks into the two bottles. Place it where the temperature will come from inside of the bottle.
   • Record the initial temperature in both bottles.
   • In one of the bottles, make your mixture (either tablets and water or baking soda and vinegar to create carbon dioxide in the bottle). You can use the funnel to get the mixture into the bottle.
   • Turn on the heat lamps and place the bottles in front of them.
   • Wait about 5-10 minutes and check the temperatures again.
   • Have a discussion with your students about how this relates to the greenhouse effect and how the greenhouse effect impacts the Earth. How does each part of the demo relate to the Earth?
3. You can do the same thing mentioned in option 2, but if you have enough time and materials, you can let groups of students do the experiment themselves!

This will give students a chance to understand how our Earth’s atmosphere holds in heat and what part greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, play into the equation.

This will help the content make more sense once you get into it!

Climate Change Lesson

Once your students are curious about this topic, they are now more willing to dive into the content, learn some of the evidence for climate change, and even some questions that scientists have about the evidence and data.

I believe that questioning is essential for improving science!

This climate change interactive lesson is perfect to introduce students to the greenhouse effect and climate change. This lesson doesn’t just “spit out” information for students, but it allows for critical thinking, something that students desperately need!

This lesson uses the 7 steps to help students retain information, ultimately helping them to understand the content better and store it in their long-term memory.

In this climate change lesson, students will explore the causes of climate change, how carbon dioxide has impacted temperatures since around 1850, evidence of climate change, and questions that some scientists have about this evidence and data.

There are embedded activities in the lesson to help students process information (researched-based!). There is a KWL, exploring resources online, drag-and-drop activities, analyzing graphs, and more!

Climate Change Activities for Students to WIDEN Knowledge

At this point in your global climate change lesson plan, you should have motivated your students with a WONDER activity and then your students learned the content through an interactive lesson. WOW, they have learned a lot so far, but if you have time, it’s always great to WIDEN their knowledge even more.

These are the activities where students can show off what they have already learned in addition to learning more!

Have a Debate

Looking to add to a climate change debate lesson plan? Awesome!

What’s a good controversial topic without a debate? In the interactive lesson (mentioned above), students learned some solid evidence towards climate change, but they also explored some other viewpoints and looked at data that needs to be evaluated further.

So, if you’ve never hosted a debate in your classroom, you want it to be organized and respectful, so here’s what I want you do to.

With all of the tools at our fingertips, setting up something like this is easy.

1. Go to your favorite AI search tool like ChatGPT or Gemini.
2. Type in “how to set up a debate in a middle school science classroom on climate change”.
3. There you have it! Instructions to get the debate party started in your classroom.
4. You can ask it further questions such as, “Type out student directions.”, “Type out student expectations to remain respectful.”, or “What resources can students use that are reputable?”.

Technology can be great sometimes! This is an awesome climate change group activity!

Guest Speaker

This would be a WONDERFUL opportunity to invite a guest speaker to your classroom.

There are a lot of resources online, data, blogs, articles, and I could go on. The information is quite overwhelming. However, if you bring in someone, either in person or online, who studies this for a living, it could be extremely powerful.

Depending on where you live, you may know someone locally such as a college professor, meteorologist, or local scientist that studies this information.

You can also bring in a guest virtually from organizations such as Skype a Scientist. If you are looking for a religious perspective on climate change, you can look into contacting someone at Answers in Genesis.

I hope your students enjoy the climate change lessons for middle school that you create for them!

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