Climate Detectives Projects 2018-2019

Project title: Climate Detectives vs Climate Change

Team: Climate Agents

2018-2019   5th Primary School of Evosmos-Thessaloniki-Greece   Thessaloniki   Greece   22 Student’s age: 8-9

Our team wanted to investigate “Climate change”, as we believe it is one of the greatest threats that humanity faces during the last decades. The devastating storms and floods that hit Greece last winter, the horrifying fires in our country every summer-especially the one of last July with too many victims unfortunately- lead us to this decision. We wanted to understand as many aspects of this issue and finally try to make a difference, to act! The project started with a class discussion, whose final conclusion was the introduction of the following terms: “Climate”, “Climate Change” and “Global Warming”. Simple and easy to understand vocabulary was carefully chosen as my students are 8- 9 years old! So, we talked about the “Climate” as the average pattern of weather conditions over a long period of time, while weather is not the same, as it changes daily. “Climate Change” was easy to understand, to be felt. Almost everyone has heard and used the “greenhouse effect” term. “Global warming” is the increase in Earth’s average temperature over a long period of time. After all these it was time to proceed to #EuropeanSpaceAgency’s website, https://www.esa.int/ and especially to https://www.esa.int/Education/Climate_detectives in order to reclaim the very useful *Classroom resources*. So, we used the following resources and material from “Teach with space”: * From the ground and from the sky-Analyzing and understanding images of planet earth taken from space * The ice is melting-How can we investigate the effects of melting ice? * Earth under the lid-Understanding the greenhouse effect- Also a Paxi animation. * One year on Earth- Understanding seasons * Nose up in the sky-Observing and measuring weather conditions Furthermore we read children books, like “Our Earth has fever”, watched videos and studied relevant material from the Environmental Education Centers of our area.

Through these activities, • My pupils became familiar with the importance of observing the Earth by ESA astronauts from the ISS or by an Earth observation satellite especially in matters of environmental earth problems. • They explored the impact of global warming and melting ice on sea level, designed their own experiment to examine how the results of ice melting in a change in the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere, learned about glaciers. • Atmosphere and normal quantity of greenhouse gases allow us, humans, to live on our planet. But the overproduction of those gases causes the greenhouse effect and increases the global warming. Pupils got acquainted with all these data and their consequences. • The next resource enhanced pupils’ knowledge of seasons, and noticed the influence of the Sun- Earth system on seasons. • Observing and measuring weather conditions: pupils learned how to describe weather conditions, built a small meteorological station and take weather measurements of rain, wind speed and air temperature. • The conclusion was easy for our team: climate can be affected by Earth’s atmosphere, which is made up of gases. While sunlight enters our atmosphere, some of this heat is trapped by the gas and so earth stays warm and habitable and some returns back out into space. • Energy sources like oil, gas and coal that are the main power for homes, car and industries unfortunately release a gas (carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere, which traps heat that would otherwise escape Earth’s atmosphere. This leads to an increase of Earth’s temperature, which contributes to the planet’s warming. • Finally my little Climate Detectives found out that there are many things that could change in their school to protect the climate!

We were very happy, when we got to the point to take action as real Climate Detectives!We decided to become Defenders,Little Heroes! After a brainstorming of ideas about solutions to lessen the problem of global warming, we wrote down our discoveries, suggestions,recommendations- such as “Basic Energy saving tips” . The next step was to inform at first all the other classes of the school, their teachers and the whole community beyond the pupils’ families. The pupils were divided in groups of 4-5 with the task to collect information about Renewable Energy Sources. Other tasks were to prepare several questionnaires about the heating of our school building,our homes, the transportation ways adopted by everyone, the most environmentally friendly ways to do everything ,the Recycling, the Re-use, the Waste Reduce,the Composting, environmental friendly products e.t.c. We decided to participate in #Let’s_do_it_Greece_2019 and to make a difference,showing in practice that we really do care!We draw our own poster for our participation- which could also act as motivation!- in the *School week of volunteer awareness raising on environmental issues*.We hope next year more classes would like to become part of it! https://www.letsdoitgreece.org/ As a conclusion : Yes, our climate is changing! But,it is not late! All together, young and old, we can take action! At school, we can do a lot! Some notes about the project: 1.Role play is a particularly interesting technique in the Environmental Education. Students assume roles and exercise in arguing, even for positions that are unlikely to support them in their everyday lives.I did apply it in my class. 2. Our suggestions and the questionnaires are written in greek ,of course.I can translate them,if it is needed!