Piloting Sea Level Rise Lessons at the Elementary Institute of Science

The Climate Science Alliance partnered up with the Elementary Institute of Science to pilot interactive lessons about sea level rise, as part of the Alliance’s new curriculum developed for the Sea Level Rise Awareness, Education, and Literacy (SEAL) program—a collaborative effort with eight partnering institutions. Learn more about the pilot program and how to stay updated with the roll-out!

This fall the Climate Science Alliance (Alliance) teamed up with the Elementary Institute of Science (EIS) to pilot our brand new sea level rise curriculum. This new curriculum was developed as a part of the Sea Level Rise Awareness, Education and Literacy (SEAL) program, a collaborative program of more than 8 partnering institutions working together to better understand and communicate sea level rise impacts to coastal communities across the United States with support from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and four National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Sea Grant programs. The Climate Science Alliance is part of this collaboration, and has been working closely with Sea Grant California, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Noyo Center for Marine Science on sea level rise curriculum that aims to meet sea level rise education needs across the California coast.

After 2 years spent creating the curriculum and garnering feedback from educator focus groups, the time finally came to pilot the new materials. In September of this year, Alliance staff member Jeanette Starpine provided an initial training and overview of the sea level rise educational materials for EIS educators. This training enabled the EIS team to begin piloting the lessons with 4 of their 5th grade classes, reaching more than 50 students. In this multi-touchpoint pilot, both EIS and the Climate Science Alliance staff interacted directly with the 5th graders to teach them about climate change and sea level rise topics. 

Climate Science Alliance staff, Allize Jimenez and Sarah Morgan, met with EIS in person to learn more about what these lessons look like in action, and shadowed the EIS educators while they piloted the lessons. During this visit, EIS staff tested out the lesson Community Balance: A Sea Level Rise Tumbling Tower where students responded to impacts caused by sea level rise as well as community solutions. 

“It was a great experience talking to youth about climate change and empowering them with solutions to adapt!” - Allize Jimenez, Engagement and Communications Apprentice

This shadowing experience allowed Alliance staff to better understand the needs of the students at EIS, so now it was their turn to teach! Allize and Sarah teamed up to teach another lesson from the sea level rise curriculum, The Sound of Sea Level Rise. In this lesson students learned how to read real graphs with multiple data points and understand the general trend of sea level rise from 1970 until present day, thanks to NASA data. After transferring the data into a chart students were able to test the pattern by using instruments to make a range of sounds representative of the sea level changes. Over time, students heard the pitch continue to get higher, similar to the rise of the sea level since 1970. 

The Climate Science Alliance  team enjoyed working with the students and adapting the lesson to fit the classroom’s needs, and looked forward to incorporating all the feedback and learnings from these pilot testing sessions into the educational materials. 

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Thank You

Thank you to our partners at EIS, and to the whole NASA Sea Level Education,  Awareness and Literacy project team!

Learn More

Activities and resources created through the SEAL program will be available in a Traveling Trunk on Sea Level Rise, and online through the Climate Kids Connects portal. To hear when these are available to explore, be sure to sign up for the Climate Science Alliance newsletter.