Climate Change and Human Interactions with the Environment

In honor of Earth Day (April 22) and Arbor Day (May 25) I did a week theme of Climate Change and Human Interactions. We learned about the positive and negative ways we impact nature and the earth.


Earth Day Garden Planning
As a large group we began designing our plan for a vegetable garden! We decided on creating a pizza garden theme, so it will include foods that we can grow and harvest to make pizza! (tomatoes, peppers, herbs..)



Sea Level Rise Demo

I designed a very basic experiment to show the kids the relationship between glaciers, icebergs, and climate change. I set up two little containers of water. We placed ice directly into the water in one, and on top of "land" in the other- to represent icebergs and land glaciers, respectively. We marked of the level of the water in each container with a permanent marker. (If the marker or sides are too wet, the marker won't work..)


We talked a little about climate change, particularly global warming. I had kids predict what was going to happen when these were exposed to warming (in our case, heat lamps). Would nothing happen? Would sea level change on one? would sea level change on both? Most kids guessed both would increase.....the response I was expecting. Obviously the way the experiment should work, if successful, is that the glaciers will increase the sea level while the icebergs have already displaced water and since ice takes up more space than water, sea level wouldn't be rising, if anything getting a tiny bit lower.
With the kids, we put about the same amount of ice in both containers. But I later added a bit more to the glaciers to make sure we'd have a visible difference. The next day we came in to see all the ice melted and talked about why things happened the way they did!




Climate Change Haiku
To show our appreciation for nature we wrote some poetry! I was inspired to do this activity because of the super awesome person that summarized the entire 4th IPCC report in haiku. I had a small booklet of that to show the kids. They were mostly interested in writing their own words... or copying my example.

Arbor Day
To celebrate Arbor Day we planted a new apple tree in the front of our building!