Year 6 KNZB Climate Ready Classrooms - Carbon Footprints and Case Studies

 

Today we started with a fun activity to indicate our carbon footprint; we took steps forwards or backwards according to our day to day activities.  Drive to school? Take 3 steps forward.  Compost at home? Take 2 steps back. We learnt that we can all make everyday choices that will reduce our environmental impact. Hopefully humans can balance our carbon in our lifetime. 🤞🌱🌏

Next we learnt about the Greenhouse Effect.  We put our learning into practice by becoming town planners fo the hypothetical town of Boulderville.  They needed a new low impact energy source.  We researched other towns to see which solution would work best and put forward a proposal.  

⚡️From our discussion Aston wondered if we could create perpetual motion turbines to avoid burning stuff. Future Elon Musk!!

Have you heard about the new bioenergy initiative in Auckland and solar farms going into the Waikato.  It's great to see our learning in action for a sustainable world!

K2 Get Future Fit

 Today K2 launched into our learning by exploring biodiversity and the carbon cycle with KNZB Climate Ready Classrooms. We discovered human action is unbalancing the carbon cycle and played a fun game to explore the importance of biodiversity.

Next we investigated the Greenhouse Effect and Carbon Footprints. We used https://www.futurefit.nz/questionnaire to work our our carbon footprints.  The average foot print was 8.4947. International travel effects our footprint the most.

We discovered we can offset by eating less meat, have an electric car or use public transport or walk, compost, less long haul travel, and being careful with energy use.

Learning about climate change can be a bit sad so we talked about things we do to cheer ourselves up like walks, reading, playing sport, gardening and being with friends.

Lastly we focussed on the actions we can take to reduce our footprint and broke into groups to see how we could encourge this action in our community. Some ideas included writing a Kahoot, creating posters, writng a picturebook, a Scratch game, a boards game and a video.

After morning tea we helped to offset our carbon footprint by planting native hebes. Their flowers will feed our bees too.

K2 Climate Change Challenge

 

Today K2 began looking at climate change. We began by clarifying the misconception that the hole in the ozone layer is to do with climate change.  It doesn't have anything to do with climate change but does go to show humans can come together to fix their environmental mistakes.

Next we took part in a Climate Change Breakout provided by Live Lightly at the Eye On Nature event. We worked as a team to solve the clues and learnt everyday actions we can take to live a lower carb life:

- bike or walk

- eat vegetarian more

- reuse items

Our time was 9minutes and 15 seconds. We won the class competition!! Mrs Daniel said we were quickest because we had great communication. 

Next we found out there is lots of misinformation about climate change. We did a Kahoot and sorting game to investigate ideas about climate change and causes of carbon dioxide using the new KNZB Climate Ready Classroom resource. 

Next time we'll learn about the role of scientists.