After-Play - Activity 8

Climate Change (Post-Show)

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Climate Change (Post-Show)

Objectives: Learn about climate change and what can be done to stop it.

Materials: Chart paper with pre-show brainstorming, markers

Curriculum Connections (Click Here)

Directions:

1. Climate Change and Head à Tête

Add students’ answers to the following questions to the sheet you created in the pre-show activity. If you didn’t do the pre-show activity, complete it with students now and then continue with the questions below.

Questions

  • The Environment of Head à Tête

    • What was the environment of the show?

      • Temperature?

      • Food?

      • Water?

      • Shelter?

      • Is it safe?

    • How do Moitié and Please feel about their environment?

    • How did Moitié and Please interact with the environment? (What did they do to the tree?)

    • How do Moitié and Please feel about each other?

    • How do Moitié and Please interact with each other?

    • Why might their environment be that way?

  • What can change the environment?

    • How could climate change have affected Moitié and Please’s planet?

 

2. Learning About Climate Change: The Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a proposed new geological epoch. Geological epochs are divisions in the geological time scale. Divisions of time from largest to smallest are eon, era, period, epoch, age. Students may be familiar with the names of some periods from the Mesozoic Era which include the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods.

 

Watch this video on the Anthropocene

 

Invite students to calculate their carbon footprint using one of the following sites:

 

Learn about the most impactful ways of reducing emissions:

 

Investigate the distribution of responsibility:

Responsibility for climate change is not evenly distributed. In fact, some take issue with the proposed epoch Anthropocene because it lays responsibility on all of humanity. Current and projected emissions are largely the responsibility of developed and developing nations while the effects of climate change are impacting many colonized nations first. Furthermore, the individual is often the focus of reducing emissions when corporations and governments exert much more influence on the factors which have a much larger impact on emissions.

 

For younger grades, manipulatives may be a good way of understanding relative emissions. For example by representing the percentage of global emissions of each country with tiles, students can understand that some countries emit much more CO2 than others in absolute terms. The map of CO2 emissions per capita can provide a link to geography.

 

Older students can compare emissions per capita and explain the difference between total emissions and per capita emissions.

 

3. Taking Action on Climate Change

Many First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people have been at the forefront of climate change activism. Have students learn about some of the following movements and then present what they have learned to the class.

  • Idle No More

  • Defenders of the Land

  • Indigenous Environmental Network

 

Greta Thunberg is a youth climate activist who advocates for policies which will reduce CO2 emissions. One way she and other students protest current inaction by governments is by refusing to attend school on Fridays in a movement known as Fridays For Future.

 

Take a look at the links below for examples of youth climate activism.

 

Follow the links below for fillable worksheets for students to learn about their political representatives, their parties, and their positions on environmental policies:

  • Local, Provincial/Territorial, and National Representatives

  • Provincial Parties (Ontario)

  • Federal Parties

 

For guidance, the following scorecards from environmental charities outline party positions from the most recent provincial and federal elections:

  • Ontario:

http://www.greenprosperity.ca/scorecard/

 

 

 

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