The basics of climate must be understood to have a climate literate populace. Understanding climatic change is a wicked problem. This work identifies three foundational content challenges to climate and climate change education, discusses them thoroughly, and offers graphics and conceptual models to address this content in the classroom. The three…

The devastating wildfires that erupted in Southern California in early January 2025 were historic in scale and impact, and interrupted the education of more than 725,000 students. There was a disproportionate impact on vulnerable populations, including students with disabilities, Latino and multilingual learners, and the socio-economically…

Early Childhood Education in general, and Early Childhood Education for Sustainability in particular, have dominantly relied on an ontological framework that privileges children's agency. This paper challenges this dominant narrative by attuning to the everyday ways in which children are moved by the weather within a multitude of weather…

Cloud cover created fog and many days of low visibility. With surprisingly no wind for weeks on end, water droplets in the fog froze on impact with tree branches, poles, doors--any stable object, creating a magical display of rime ice, which is heavier and denser than hoarfrost. The picturesque result made the month seem so much less dreary,…

The goal of this work is to build a low cost pedagogical device able to improve the comprehension of weather phenomena for African students in particular and in general for students across the world. This experimental and didactic device can be seen as an easy teaching tool to measure meteorological and climatic data. This structure is called a…

The climate justice lesson described in this article takes two to four class periods and assumes students have been introduced to the causes and effects of climate change. Using a phenomena-based teaching strategy, students are introduced to some of our most vulnerable communities around the world. They are the ones most defenseless when it comes…

The authors describe their resources for raising awareness and encouraging positive water behaviours among young children. The DRY (Drought Risk and You) project brought together a multidisciplinary team to create a research-informed storybook and teachers' notes for 7- to 11-year-olds. This article takes a brief look at the book and reflects on…

Laura A. Schifter and Jonathan Klein highlight the many ways in which K-12 schools and students have tremendous potential to advance solutions on environmental issues, and they provide frameworks for enacting change, in "Students, Schools, and Our Climate Moment." Schifter and Klein demonstrate how the effects of climate change intersect…

In response to the perception that climate change is too abstract and its consequences too far-reaching for us to make a difference, recent feminist environmental humanities scholars have drawn attention to connections that can be forged by noticing the intermingling of bodies, relations, materials, places and movements in the world. Inspired by…

This article is organized around describing a pair of resources developed to support student and teacher use of the instructional model Claim, Evidence, and Reasoning (CER) in the classroom and incorporate writing as a meaningful part of their science instruction. Project LISTO developed and put the Scaffolding Scientific Explanations (SSE)…

A video is taken of a road-sign mirage from the passenger seat in a car traveling at constant speed on a highway. The video spans the duration of seeing the mirage of the sign, viewing the vanishing of the mirage as the car approaches, and passing the road sign. The mirage angle, defined as the angle with respect to the horizontal at the moment…

This article provides an overview of the instructional activity implemented to introduce the authors' first-grade students to the concept of measuring, collecting, and recording temperature data as part of a unit on weather. The activities introduced involved approximately one week of instructional time. However, the application of the skill…

General education science courses strive to promote scientific literacy and the development of scientific process skills. However, research shows that many general education courses are still designed to stress content mastery. In this study, the number of topics in five semester-long introductory atmospheric science courses was reduced to…

Will spring be early next year? This is a question the authors ponder each fall as they prepare for a yearlong citizen science project with kindergartners. Citizen science projects naturally promote the development of science and engineering practices. These projects can be integrated at any grade level and aligned to meet other content areas as…

Everyone has an aunt or grandfather or other relative who can tell when the weather is changing because his or her joints start to ache or an old injury begins to hurt. This column provides background science information for elementary teachers. This month's issue focuses on three major weather factors and how they affect the human…