Provided by: ClimateScience |Published on: April 27, 2021
Lesson Plans Grades 6-8, 9-12
Synopsis
This interactive course about the impacts of agriculture includes sections on food and climate, feeding 10 billion people, selective breeding, genetic engineering (GMOs), making meat, fishing and aquaculture, lab meat and plant alternatives, food waste, urban farming, and current challenges in farming.
The course contains text, interactive questions, infographics, data charts, videos, links to references, a final quiz, and a certificate of completion.
This resource takes students through the many aspects of agriculture that affect the environment (e.g., water use, fertilizer and pesticide footprints and ecological effects, deforestation, land use changes, etc.).
It provides ideas for sustainable agricultural solutions.
Students earn a certificate if they complete the course.
Additional Prerequisites
This course is part of a series of climate change courses from ClimateScience.
Students should have a basic understanding of climate change prior to beginning this course.
Students will need a computer and internet connection to use the interactive features and watch the videos.
The course uses the acronym GEO instead of GMO, but they are talking about the same thing. GEO stands for genetically engineered organism and GMO stands for genetically modified organism.
The course does not discuss the embedded pesticides in many GMO crops (Bt crops) and the much larger quantity of herbicides used on many GMO crops (made to tolerate their chemicals), which may affect water quality, biodiversity, and air quality.
Teachers and students will need to enroll and create a free account to use the course and save their progress.
Differentiation
This course provides two levels of learning. Before enrolling in the course, users can scroll down and use the button to toggle between. "Simple" and "Advanced." The "Simple" setting is recommended for middle school students, while the "Advanced" setting is recommended for high school students.
Students can proceed through this course at their own pace.
Students could research the large multinational companies that own and sell the majority of crop seeds globally.
Cross-curricular connections could be made with geography and social studies classes when discussing the food, water, and resource needs of our growing global population.
ClimateScience inspires young talents to seek careers in fields where they contribute to climate solutions. By providing beautifully illustrated, understandable, science-based educational content for free for everyone, they are building the fundamentals for Climate Education.
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