A set of snow activities from the Tracking Climate in Your Backyard curriculum.
Tracking Climate: Hydrologic Cycle Activities
A set of hydrologic cycle activities from the Tracking Climate in Your Backyard curriculum.
Tracking Climate: Wind Activity
An activity from the Tracking Climate in Your Backyard curriculum.
Tracking Climate: Climate Activities
A set of climate activities from the Tracking Climate in Your Backyard curriculum.
What Makes a Thunderstorm?
This activity allows us to see how a cool, dense mass can force a warmer, less dense mass upward, as well as observe the instability of the masses once this has occurred. Finally, if we let them interact long enough, the system re-equilibrates.
Where Does Rain Come From?
In this activity, we’ll see where rain comes from and where it goes by using a cup as a lake (water reservoir) and a bag as our atmosphere.
Confetti Snow Maps
This activity looks at how we measure snowfall and then creates precipitation contour maps to determine where the heaviest snowfall occurred. Contour mapping of precipitation is also used in weather forecasting to determine what areas will be most heavily impacted by potential snowfall.
The Snowflake Game
This activity helps students understand the components of clouds, snow, and rain.
Buckets of CO2
This activity looks at how humans contribute carbon dioxide to our atmosphere.
Soak up the CO2: How Your Backyard Affects the Ocean
This activity explores what happens to oceans which have absorbed much more carbon dioxide than they normally contain as a result of human carbon emissions.
Raise the Waters
This activity explores what happens to water as it is heated and cooled.
What is a Watershed?
This activity allows youth to create their own topography and see its effects on a watershed. Then it allows youth to explore what happens when those watersheds are contaminated.
The Incredible Journey
This activity will explore how water cycles through the planet, and give insight into how long water remains in each part of the cycle.
Understanding Evapotranspiration
This activity explores the role of plants in the hydrologic cycle.
Why Does the Wind Blow?
In this activity, we look at the different pieces of the climate puzzle that, when put together, create our winds.
Snow Journaling
This activity has youth journal their winter weather to learn more about the variation during the season and about making scientific observations.
Super Cool Edible Ice
This activity explores the science behind the effect salt has on changing the physical properties of water, which also helps people adapt their lifestyles to their surroundings.
Light, Fluffy, Wet, Heavy: How much water is in that snow?
This activity explores how much water is in the snow after a recent snowfall in your community.
Where is My Backyard?
This activity looks at how climate, habitat, and endangered species are all related.
Temperature Through Time
This activity provides information on how scientists use ‘proxy’ information, like that from tree rings, to learn about ancient climates.
Energetic Weather
In this activity, after we learn how temperature is a measure of energy, we become a group of water molecules undergoing phase changes together.
Tracking Climate: Temperature Activities
A set of temperature activities from the Tracking Climate in Your Backyard curriculum.
Tracking Climate: Rain Activities
A set of rain activities from the Tracking Climate in Your Backyard curriculum.
Make it Rain
This activity will show us some of the basic forces acting together to create rain.
Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) and the Cayuga Lake Watershed
In this module consisting of 6 sections, students explore lake ecology, harmful algal blooms (HABs) and their causes, climate change, and actions to mitigate HABs.
Photosynthesis: Calculating Biomass and Carbon Storage in Trees
Photosynthesis is the process that builds the biomass of plants, and plants take in carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. Students will measure a tree and compute how much CO₂ it has taken in over its lifetime.
The World in a Tank: CO₂ Drawdown Challenge
Students will design and test a closed system that will pull CO₂ levels down below pre-industrial atmospheric concentrations (that is, below 280 ppm). The objective is to design a tank where the rate of photosynthesis exceeds that of respiration so that CO₂ levels decrease on average over time.
PPM: The Impact of Trace Elements in the Environment
The environmental consequences of tiny quantities can be huge. In this activity we use dye and water to show how big a tiny change can be. Students sequentially add drops of food coloring to one liter of water to assess the change caused by a trace component. The changes can be described qualitatively, or, quantified with photographs or a light meter.
Women, Climate, Past, Present, and Future
For International Women’s Day, Alexandra Moore, one of PRI’s women climate scientists, has created short video features on some of the activities that she engages in across a typical day. This toolkit includes these videos along with student activities that match the theme of each film.
DIY Solar Energy: Photosynthetic Solar Cells
Using materials like iodine, blackberry juice, and a few specialized components, students will create a working solar cell that mimics the process of photosynthesis.
Respiration
Students measure the flux of carbon dioxide from soil to the atmosphere using a lab CO2 probe and home-made flux chambers. The experiment can be designed to allow students to manipulate the experimental conditions, and explore the relationship between temperature and respiration, pointing to an important consequence of global climate change.
Build a Wind-Powered Machine
This activity involves building a tiny, wind-powered elevator: a small cup lifted by a pinwheel. You could use the elevator to lift things from the ground floor to the second floor of a house you make from shoe boxes.
Timeline: How Long Ago Was The Last Glacial Maximum?
Students work together to create a rope timeline that illustrates time scales of thousands of years compared with human lifetimes.
Vision for a Better Climate Future
Students use art to express their vision of what a better climate future could look like in their community, and how we could achieve this.
Divert and Capture Heavy Rains
Students build small paper houses and design and build structures such as gutters and rain gardens to divert and capture rainwater. They then test their designs with simulated rain.
Weather Instruments
Students build a simple wind dial (anemometer) and explore how pine cones can tell us about humidity in the air.
Adapting a Garden to Heavy Rain
Students learn through play in this activity where they devise, create, and test ideas for protecting a garden from heavy rains.
Temperature Detectives
Students use basic thermometers to measure air temperatures under different conditions, draw conclusions about why air temperatures differ in these conditions, and apply what they’ve learned to strategies for staying cool during extreme heat events.
Thermal Expansion of Water
In this activity we calculate the coefficient of thermal expansion for tap water. Students will heat water in a long-necked glass bottle to explore the relationship between temperature and volume of water. Quantifying the initial volume, change in volume, and the initial and final temperatures allows students to calculate the coefficient of thermal expansion.
Sunlight Stored in Soil
Students measure a soil temperature profile to explore the effect of energy from the Sun on the shallow subsurface environment. Multiple temperature profiles allow students to analyze the daily change in energy that diffuses into the subsurface, and its differential impact near the surface and at depth.