WEEKS 3 AND 4
Our climate change lecture began with some general facts and an outline of what climate change actually is. Prior to this lecture, I had limited knowledge on climate change, all I really knew is that it related to the weather. However, I soon learned that the term ‘climate change’ covers more than just our recent weather. Climate is the average weather at a given point and time of year, over a long period we expect the weather to change a lot day to day but the climate to remain consistent. Our climate system is important as it determines our weather, decisions by humans have long term affects on our climate. A young girl, Greta Thurnberg, outlines humans impact on climate change, in a way I couldn’t compete with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3SmqCcNbU8
This weeks science workshop looked at our inquiry and investigative skills. We started off by completing a task about a plane crash on an island, firstly we were all given an area, ours was the savannah grass lands. We were then required to investigate the area and complete a few tasks about what items we think would be important to have. This required us to negotiate with our team members, listen to eachother and express our personal ideas. I personally really enjoyed this task, I think it would work well within the classroom as an icebreaker sort of task. It required me to step out my comfort zone a little when having to express my opinion and have others challenge it.
We then went on to complete some climate change related experiments. The experiment you can see in the video below was to show that heat rises. We had a bucket of room temperature water, two plastic cups, one of which was full of very warm water and the other ice cold water. We then put a couple of drops of red food colouring in the warm cup, and blue food colouring in the cold cup. To carry out the actual experiment, we had to drop the two plastic cups into the water and watch closely. As you can see in the video, the warm water all rises to the top and the cold water spreads along the bottom. We also completed a few other experiments, to show rain and tornados etc.
I really enjoyed the use of these experiments to further develop our understanding of climate change. Using the Curriculum for Excellence I think the experience and outcome that would best suit this would be “I can explain some of the processes which contribute to climate change and discuss the possible impact of atmospheric change on the survival of living things. SCN 3-05b” I think that these experiments would be great for third level pupils to put into practice what they have learned over the course of their climate change topic. As a student, one thing that I learned and will take away from this workshop, is that experiments don’t always go to plan. However, pupils can still learn from them.
Our second workshop went on to look at the link between climate change and global warming. Prior to this workshop, I would have said that climate change and global warming are almost the same thing. Global warming is when, greenhouse gasses travel into the earths atmosphere, where they are trapped causing the earth to heat up. This is known as the greenhouse effect and the rising temperature of the earth as a result of this, is known as global warming.
Reflecting on my knowledge now compared to before this input, I feel so much more aware of my actions and the affects they are having on not only humans, but animals and plants aswell. I completed the WWF Footprint Calculator which was an extreme eye opener! Going about my day to day life I quite often forget how small actions such as leaving the TV on standby are having a massive affect on the world around me. I think this resource would be great to use in the classroom, we could all as a class, come up with ways to reduce our carbon footprint.
References:
Education.gov.scot. (2019). Curriculum for Excellence: Sciences. [online] Available at: https://education.gov.scot/Documents/sciences-eo.pdf [Accessed 27 Sept. 2019].
