Our REU student teaches middle school students about climate change

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In Nov 2017, Terry Marcey, senior at PSU and REU student on our Klamath grant, lead a climate change outreach activity with students at Stayton Middle School in Stayton, OR. The classroom experiment was carried out in Nikita Noelcke’s and Lindsey Kaufman’s 6th grade classrooms. The activity that he carried out consisted of creating aluminum foil models of Antarctica, its mountains, and its ice shelves. We then created a slime solution from Elmer’s glue and borax, which had a viscosity that was meant to mimic the flow of ice towards the ocean on Antarctica. The students placed the slime on the model continent, removed the foil walls that represented the ice shelves, and observed the flow of ice to the oceans. We then looked at time lapse images of the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002. We ended the activity by asking students what they thought they could do in their own lives to reduce the impacts of climate change. The activity that we performed was found on the Climate, Literacy, and Energy Awareness Network’s website:

www.cleanet.org/resources/42699.html