One hundred and five times the size of Wales - that’s the amount of sea ice lost since 1979, according to Nasa. But figures like that are hard for primary-age children to process, and this illustrates one of the difficulties in teaching about climate change: the subject is so big, and so abstract, that delivering lessons on it at primary level is a huge challenge.
One way of engaging and educating primary children is to look at local changes; changes they can see, touch, feel and, most importantly, have a stake in. Looking at alterations in local ecosystems can provide children with a microcosm of broader problems.
Bird’s eye view
The British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) publishes a BirdTrends report each year taken from data collected by “citizen scientists” (in other words, me and you), outlining the decline of native bird species.
This is such an engaging and easy topic to get involved with: children love learning outside the classroom; they don’t see it as work. Set up a bird hide in your school garden, playing field, playground or anywhere you have the room. A hide can be anything from a purpose-built shed to a shelter made from branches or a tarpaulin covered with leaves - you could even link it to the design and technology curriculum by asking pupils to help build it.
Ask the children to identify, name and record each species, linking the task to the science curriculum. This can be done over a day or a week, with pairs or small groups taking “shifts” throughout the day. Get computing and art involved by taking photographs in different settings and lights or sketching using lines and shading.
Once the data is collected, it can be presented in graphs and tables for comparison with national data from the BTO report, or information recorded previously by other classes or year groups in your school. This way your maths teaching uses real-world information from which the pupils can draw conclusions and use as evidence in any written reports.
As the climate changes, the migration of plant species over time will result in bird migration patterns shifting to higher latitudes; this can give us clear evidence of how climate change affects us directly - no melting sea ice needed.
The butterfly effect
The Big Butterfly Count (BBC) is a nationwide survey organised every July and August by the charity Butterfly Conservation. Butterflies react very quickly to changes in their environment and are an early warning for declines in other species. As a result, they make excellent biodiversity indicators, helping us to understand the effect of climate change on all wildlife and linking well to most national curriculum outcomes around habitats, animals and humans.
This is another great outdoor activity for children. After studying the life cycle of butterflies, the students can learn to identify various species and then apply this in the BBC. This can be done in groups at various stages in the school day and in various ways: a walk around a local nature area or park, for example, or at a fixed point in a garden, playing field or your school grounds.
Butterfly Conservation provides free resources to help with identification, and you can upload the data you collect straight onto the website at www.bigbutterflycount.org. You can compare your information with previous years’ results in the local area via an interactive mapping tool (supporting geography outcomes) and nationally by looking at the results summary.
You can also easily link your BBC activities to the classic example of the peppered moth, used to support Darwin’s theory of evolution. The gradual movement of darker-coloured insects to cooler climates and the predominance of lighter-coloured insects in warmer climates has proved how species adapt to their environment. This learning can then be used as a basis for a written report on the subject.
Insect nation
EDF Energy, too, has some great resources on climate change, including some written with the Met Office and the BTO. Members of its Pod schools programme can participate in the “What’s under your feet?” citizen science survey, looking at changes in invertebrate populations. This is part of investigating the decline in many classic British bird species, as what the birds eat may have an impact on their changing populations.
The invertebrates survey is another great hands-on science investigation with some great outcomes around classification and species identification. The data also lends itself well to comparing microhabitats, using mapping on a small scale. Pupils can then use these maps to draw conclusions from the data and write up their findings in a report to be presented to a class or parents.
Seeing the wood for the trees
Another area to look at is the climate record revealed by trees. As tree rings effectively record growing seasons, they are a good source of data when looking at the history of climatic conditions within an area. Tree rings usually grow wider in warm, wet years and are thinner in years when it is cold and dry. If a tree has experienced stressful conditions, such as a drought, it might hardly grow at all.
The identification and naming of trees forms part of the statutory requirements of the key stage 1 science curriculum. Tree ring analysis (or dendrochronology, if you really want to impress your pupils) helps to consolidate and apply this knowledge by taking it a step further, using the tree’s growth record to tell us more about the climate in an area.
You can gather your data from a variety of sources - dead wood on the floor, fallen trees or living samples - all of which can be compared to draw conclusions about the climate in an area dating back tens or even hundreds of years.
Many tree surgeons will have piles of tree waste that you can use if samples from your local area are hard to come by. By looking at these records, children can come to an understanding of the climatic conditions in your local area over time.
All these ideas make use of outdoor learning and range widely across the national curriculum for science, not to mention addressing more knowledge-based attainment targets. This is in addition to providing creative links to other subjects such as data handling in maths, writing and presenting reports in English, local area studies in history and mapping skills in geography to name but a few.
Climate change does not have to be a vast topic that children struggle to make sense of; tackling it at a neighbourhood level can make it both engaging and immediate, and give it the importance it deserves.
Dean Scott teaches at a primary school in Newham, East London
