Steps
- HAND OUT – Hand out student booklets
- WATCH – Cue up the video below and watch it with the class
- THINK – Give students time to reflect and complete their booklet
- SHARE – Have students share their ideas with the class or work in their groups
- CONSIDER – Go deeper by adding an activity from the extension buffet below
- COLLECT – Collect workbooks till the next session
- FEEDBACK -Record your feedback below
Extension Buffet
- DISCUSS – Watch the BC Hydro Ridiculous video again. What are ways you conserve energy in your everyday life already? Is there anything else you could do that could reduce the amount of energy you use?
- DAY IN THE LIFE – What would your day look like if the power went out and you had no electricity? What would be different? How would you stay warm? Cool or cook your food? Entertain yourself? What would change if the power was out for days/weeks/months?
- GO OUTDOORS – Go outdoors on an energy detective community walk around town. Can you identify any houses or businesses that use renewable energy on a local scale? Have your students take a guess before leaving the classroom and keep track of how many renewable energy sources you all see. Was it close to your original guess?
- DAMS NEAR YOU – There are dams all across Canada. Have you visited a dam? Visit the Canadian Geographic Interactive map to see dams near you and across Canada
- FIELD TRIP – Consider a field trip to a local renewable energy plant. For example, a local dam or solar field etc. Or, if you know of someone nearby who lives completely dependent on solar or wind energy, can you visit them?
- SING – Learn to sing the renewable energy song (1:59)
- ENERGY DEBATES – Get students to work in teams to face off in a debate to show why their energy source is so much better than others. Give students time to prepare with time on computers to research the various renewable energy sources and group time to prepare their team’s approach. Solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal will square off – who will be the winner?
- WATCH – Bill Nye the Science Guy talks about energy (29:51)
- CLIMATE – Climate-specific content *coming soon*
- MAKE IT – Make S’mores with a Solar Oven: Harness the energy of the Sun with a solar oven made from a box and tin foil. https://climatekids.nasa.gov/smores/
- ECOCHALLENGE – How long can you go without screens? Challenge students to take the Beyond Recycling Screen-Free EcoChallenge
The students were interested in renewable energy, and wanted to hear more about what kinds of renewable energy there currently is. Adding more information would be great so that the teacher doesn’t have to search for more information.
A basic introduction to renewable energies was sufficient. While Bill Nye is old school, kids still love his videos and the whole notion of energy is introduced. I had to heavily supplement this section to include the practicality of each resource, precisely where it can and cannot be used. Having the local example in Kimberly was great, as it provided an area that my students are familiar with and that it does get a lot of access to natural light. Are tours available fo the solar farm? Again, great to get access to this real-life resource. However, is solar achievable in our local area? I know the climate section will be coming, but I had students asking about how the recent forest fires at our site would affect the output of solar panels in our community (definitely having conversations at home). As the world is increasingly changing due to climate change, it would be great to have information on that topic.
I would like to see more emphasis on the use of hydroelectricity, especially considering that 80-90% of BC relies on this source. We have a unique geographical area that affords us this opportunity. I was able able to reach out to one of the student’s parents in my class that works for Fortis. They are currently working on getting us a tour of our local dams in the area so students can get a first-hand look at this valuable resource. It also opens the question of why we need to be strategic about our energy resources and how the local area needs to be able to accompany these renewable energies. Again, having contact information on who to contact within Fortis, BC Hydro, and municipalities to visit potential sites would be extremely helpful.
Also, I would like to see the pros and cons of using non-renewable energy resources examined. I completely understand that we need to emphasize renewable energies. However, we are not there yet on completely moving away from non-renewable energy. Instead of seeing non-renewable energy as the enemy, maybe the discussion should focus on our reliance and how we could better manage our reliance upon this energy source. It’s easy to say that we are going to move away from non-renewable energy, but with a large percentage of Canadians relying on natural gas to heat our homes, it would be great to acknowledge its importance but come back to our long-term goal of moving away from fossil fuels to a more sustainable energy source (210 years of sustainability).
We watched all of the Switch Energy videos in the extension buffet. They were an excellent summary of the pros & cons of each source. I’m not sure if you are looking for feedback about the Wildsight introduction video, but we found they went fairly quickly for all of the information provided. We paused after each topic and discussed – there is a lot of info there!
Today we also reviewed the What is Sustainable Development video found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V8oFI4GYMY. It also contains lots of information that can be broken down more.
At the end of this planning phase, we watched the renewable energy song for fun and the students surprisingly like it! (Grade 6’s can sometimes be a little cynical!)
We viewed the main video as well as the renewable energy song. We had our students get into groups and use two days to research one of the types of energy (hydro, solar, nuclear, fossil fuels, and wind). We held an energy debate where students were able to practice arguing why their assigned energy source was the best. We had students view the videos on each energy resource that BR provided, however, I had my own info packs that I provided to students. It would be nice to have print resources available from BR in addition to the videos so students can prep for their debates.
This was a FUN activity!
The extension buffet videos had lots of information for students to learn about each type of renewable energy. I would love to have a teacher list with the pros and cons of each so we could compile a list as a class and as teachers could easily add in pros and cons that they missed. I found most of my students had one idea of energy they wanted to use prior to starting. I think if there was a pros/cons activity with support for the teacher, they may have been more willing to look at other types of energy and re-evaluate how well the one they initially chose would actually work. Maybe this could be a page in the booklet. They enjoyed the song!