Teaching Sequence

Student and classroom organisation:

Step 1.

Begin this activity by asking students to spend 10 minutes exploring the Climate Change Toolbox on the Cool Australia website. Students must read this section on climate change and the Climate Change Factsheet. Once these two items have been read, students can spend the rest of the time looking through the other resources. Links to these items also available on the student worksheet under Resources.

Step 2.

The next step is to ask students to brainstorm what they already know and what they just found out about climate change. Create a mind map from your brainstorming session using either the or one of the following online programs; bubbl.us or mindmeister.

Use the following questions to guide the brainstorm:

What are the causes of climate change?
Can you break down the causes of climate change into particular and specific areas? What would these be?
How do transport, food and energy relate to transport (think about how we travel, the food we eat and the electricity we use)?
How do these three sectors relate to each other when it comes to climate change?
What other issues relate to climate change?
How are these causes related and connected? Are the causes of climate change independent of each other or are they connected? How are they connected?

Your mind map might start to look quite messy and complicated. It's time to demonstrate further to your students the complexity of climate change and how it relates to human behaviour.

Step 3.

In this part of the activity you will need a space where students can get out of their chairs. Divide your class into groups of 8 to 12 members. Assign each student with the category of either Transport, Energy or Food.

Have each person join right hands with another person in the group, but not someone who is in the same category as they are, and not someone who is standing immediately to their left or their right. For example, if they are Transport, they cannot join hands with anyone else who is Transport.

After everyone has joined right hands, then ask each student to join left hands with someone from the remaining category, but not with someone standing to their immediate left or right. Make sure that all students in each group are connected and that there aren't any small groups outside the larger group. They will probably be in a big knot.

Now have the groups try and untangle themselves without letting go of their hands. They may have to loosen their grips a little to allow for twisting and turning. They may also have to step over or under people. The first group to untangle themselves is the winner.

There are four possible solutions:

A circle within a circle.
Two interlocking circles.
A figure eight.
One large circle with people facing in either direction.

Step 4.

Once you have a winning group, hold a class discussion with your class about this exercise. Consider using the following questions:

What does this exercise teach us about how we as a society have to deal with climate change?
What does this exercise teach us about how we as individuals have to deal with climate change?

Assessment/Reflection

1. Back at their desks ask students to think about what their personal relationship is to the three sectors used in the knotted up exercise (transport, energy and food). Students should then investigate two actions that they can personally take for each of the three categories. These actions should be positive actions aimed at addressing climate change. Students can use the Climate Change Factsheet or the Cool Australia's Climate Change Toolbox for ideas. For example, for transport students could choose: walk or ride more often, carpool, or catch the bus. For energy students could choose: have cold showers, switch off the lights, and put on/take off a jumper before turning on the heater/air-conditioning. For food, students could choose to compost food waste, grow your own herbs, and eat less meat.

2. Ask students to write their suggestions down on a piece of paper, along with their name, and then cut out each suggestion. The teacher will then take all the suggestions, keeping them in their categories (transport, energy and food). The teacher then redistributes the suggestions to the students so that each student now have two suggestions for each categories from other students.

3. Students will enter their new individual actions into the student worksheet, describing how they will complete these actions.

Homework

Using the student worksheet, ask students to describe how they have completed the actions they were given, what they challenges to completing these actions were, and why these actions are important. Ask students to share their worksheets with the teacher when complete. If you have time, students can report their responses back to class.

Extension

Ask students to undertake research into the three big issues of climate change - transport, agriculture and energy. Students can work independently or in groups to uncover the following and produce a Prezi presentation on their findings:

What percentage of emissions is each of these issues responsible for?
What features of these issues make them so important to climate change (for example, coal burning for energy causes a great amount of emissions, while methane from cattle contributes greatly towards agricultural emissions)?
What could be done to address the emission in each of these areas (for example, renewable energy or electric cars)?

Knotted up in climate change

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