Current and future Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine (STEMM) students must grapple with one of the most pressing scientific issues of the century: climate change. Teaching about climate change with our youngest learners requires preparation, planting roots to foster growth, innovation, and sustainability. Building a community garden with elementary students is a way to act towards climate justice as it reminds us about how all living things are part of an interconnected system. This paper describes a fifth-grade climate change action project that was part of a unit that aligns with the state science standards and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), focused on how science learning can be used to protect the Earth’s resources and local environments. The anchoring phenomenon and lessons of the unit highlighted the annual migration of the monarch butterflies, a local endangered species and phenomenon. By planting milkweed in the garden, students learned about migration, life cycles, greenhouse gasses and the survival of monarch butterflies. This article provides educators with ideas and practical suggestions for building a garden and an overview of how the project can be implemented within a school community.

Community resources offer extensions of early science learning that can deepen connections to the local ecosystem. This column offers ideas to extend early childhood classroom science through community mapping.

Climate education in elementary grades offers a chance to teach climate science, to help students understand how serious climate change is, to focus on ecosystems and global social systems, and to work toward justice-oriented solutions. This article describes the work of nearly 70 fourth grade bilingual students, their teachers and librarian, and support from multiple community volunteers to investigate persistent problems of flooding in local waterways. Children did not study flooding as an abstract concept; instead, they approached their study of flood mitigation as civic actors whose research and voices matter for shaping public policy for their community. Over the course of a school year, children worked with teams of educators and community volunteers in a weekly science and civic engagement unit focused on connecting with the waterways and ecosystems that experience frequent and sometimes devastating flooding. During this unit of study, children made sense of flooding, the role that adaptation and mitigation can play in resilient responses to climate change, and the role that their voices can play as civic actors whose input is meaningful for shaping civic decisions not in the future as adults but now as children who have a stake in how their community functions.

Children experience and grapple with the ongoing effects of climate change in their daily lives. While they did not cause climate change nor should they have to solve it, children deserve educational opportunities to understand why and how it occurs as they prepare to address it. In this Methods and Strategies article, we share how children engaged in place-based art, science, and literacy activities designed to support them in further cultivating relationships with their ecological community and to communicate their findings with other children engaging in the same process across the three coastal communities of Boston, Toronto, and San Diego. Specifically, we highlight how crafting representations of their noticings and wonderings from family walks in their ecological communities supported children to analyze the interactions within ecosystems and express concern and care for the natural world as they engaged in the science practice of asking questions. We share how elementary teachers can support children in cultivating relationships with their local community as they make observations and ask questions to understand how climate change impacts their ecological communities.

Teaching resources from the Library of Congress

An interview with metallurgical engineer Wendi Cooksey

An interview with Kate Harding

Within this Idea Bank, we offer practical strategies to integrate ChatGPT across three science and engineering practices (i.e., asking questions and defining problems, planning and carrying out investigations, and analyzing and interpreting data) during engineering design challenges. ChatGPT offers newfound student choice, interest, and motivation, and we share relevant and useful prompts to guide student application in the aforementioned SEP outcomes. To meet the “asking questions and defining problems” outcome, students can use closed- and open-ended questions in ChatGPT throughout the engineering design challenge to engage in inquiry. This practice can help students better conceptualize the initial challenge by introducing and unpacking relevant factors, variables, constraints, criteria, theories, and characteristics. To improve access in understanding the challenge, ChatGPT presents an on-demand option that elaborates unfamiliar terms, translates terminology or text to another language, and introduces text-based scaffolding. To address the “planning and carrying out investigations” and “analyzing and interpreting data” outcomes, ChatGPT supports extended opportunities to brainstorm possible investigations and solutions, conduct theoretical experiments with conceptual and hypothetical results, analyze data both qualitatively and quantitatively, and suggest follow-up options from data analysis. Thus, ChatGPT enhances opportunities for SEP outcomes within engineering design challenges.

What other profession gives summers off, with the bonus of teaching in different locations? In this article I’ll tell how taking leaves of absence to teach at other locations was one of the opportunities that I enjoyed, which hopefully is available to other teachers as well.