As the popularity of this topic continues to grow, it might be a good opportunity to encourage your students to share their opinions. Climate change, being a quite controversial issue, provides a perfect base for the debate. In today's post, I will present some clasroom activities which you can use to inspire an interesting converstion among your students. Without futher ado... 1. Questions, questions and even more questions
A good set of questions can set the grounds for a lively and meaningful conversation. For this topic, I have focused on four main ones: WHAT, HOW, WHO and WHY. They divide my lesson plan into four parts simply to make the topic easier to follow. So what hides behind them? WHAT:
- What is a climate change?
- What do people think about?
- What do you think about it? - What is being said about it? (i.e. at school, on TV)
As you can see, the "What" part focuses mainly on the introduction to the topic, without going into much detail.
HOW:
- How does it impact our lives?
- How does it work?
- How does it impact the planet and people who live in the other parts of the Earth?
Here, we start going deeper. Making the students aware of the fact that they can actually see the changes themselves. WHO:
- Who is responsible for it?
- Who is the victim?
- Who should take action to tackle this problem?
and lastly... WHY: - Why should we care?
- Why many people don't care?
Of course, these are only some of the examples, the list of questions is much, much longer. However, I reckon it is up to you to adjust the amount and difficulty to your students :) Below, you can find a presentation which follows the plan sketched out above. It includes questions along with short videos that will make the conversastion easier.
Moving on...
2. Debates
I would recommend this for intermediate/advanced class, but you can try it out with lower level too. The topics for the debate are up to you - it could be something easy, controversial or even funny. Anything that makes your students talk ;) Below you can find some examples:
- Everyone should switch to electric cars.
- Plastic should be banned worldwide.
- Everyone should be vegan/vegetarian.
- Global warming is a myth.
- Private cars should be banned in big cities.
- Animals should have rights like humans.
- Companies should be taxed on their carbon emissions. 3. Mind maps/ posters
An artsy touch to this class :) Get your students to draw a mind map or a poster picturing steps that an individual can take to help fight the climate changes. Simple as that ;)
4. Visual aids
My all-time personal favourites - videos. Packed with information, they serve as a good starting point for not only discussions, but also practising listening skills. You can find lots of videos on this topic on YouTube. Personally, I tend to use ones from TedTalk, VOX and BBC. For now, I don't have any ready-made worksheets available, but surely they will appear soon, so keep your eye on the newest posts!
When it comes to the longer formats, I highly recommend "A life on our planet" with David Attenborough - it is packed with beatiful sceneries and depicts how nature changed within one lifetime.
A TV series worth considering - "Down to Earth with Zac Efron" - extremely easy to adapt into class. Introdues amazing and innovative ideas about sustainability from all over the world.
Both of them can be easily found on Netflix and are really worth watching.
Let's finish with a question for YOU - what are your ideas about introducing the topic of climate change to your students?
And as always... let me know what you think about activities presented in this post. I would love to hear from you!