Lessons and Standards

7th Grade Summary 

Through the 7th-grade program, students gain a preliminary understanding of how climate change works, explore carbon dioxide sources, investigate how green buildings can be designed to create less CO2, and have an opportunity to share their thoughts, feelings, and ideas about climate change and how it impacts themselves, their family and friends, and their community. 

During their classroom day, students build the belief that they are a unique person who belongs to a community of scientists.  Students work together to create a word cloud that expresses their ideas about what climate change means to them. They learn the basics of how climate change works, see that climate change is occurring on a global scale, and then investigate how their community is contributing to climate change through local carbon “sources”. Finally, they explore how their community, considered a “community of concern”, may be impacted by climate change in the future.  

During their day at the Living Lab students will 1) explore how the lab was designed as a sustainable building to help reduce CO2 emissions, 2) become green building designers and design a school of the future to help combat climate change, and 3) share their story of climate change with teachers, parents, peers, and local stakeholders and policymakers through the creation of an online newspaper. Throughout the day, students also meet a scientist who shares their career pathway, and challenges and obstacles they have faced along the way to becoming a science leader. Collectively, these experiences build students’ belief that they can recognize and do science, science is important and relevant, that a career in science is a possibility for them, and that they can make a difference in the world.

NGSS Alignment:

Performance Expectations:

  • MS-ESS2-6. Develop and use a model to describe how unequal heating and rotation of the Earth cause patterns of atmospheric and ocean circulation that determine regional climates.
  • MS-ESS3-3. Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment.
  • MS-ESS3-5. Ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperature over the past century.

Disciplinary Core Ideas:

  • ESS2.D: Global Climate Change
  • ETS1.A: Defining and Delimiting an Engineering Problem
  • ETS1.B: Developing Possible Solutions

Cross-Cutting Concept:

  • Cause and Effect – Cause and effect relationships may be used to predict phenomena in natural or designed systems.
  • Systems and Systems models – Students understand that a system is a group of related parts that make up a whole and can carry out functions its individual parts cannot. They can also describe a system in terms of its components and their interactions.
  • Stability and Change – Stability might be disturbed either by sudden events or gradual changes that accumulate over time.

Classroom Lessons:

Schedules

Additional Resources