Science Lesson: Climate Change Impacts on Crops

Positives

• Students are actively engaged in how differences in temperature and precipitation may affect crops grown in New Jersey.

• Students practice the skill of designing a scientific investigation.

Additional Prerequisites

• This lesson requires one block of 50 minutes for setting up the experiments and writing hypotheses. Students will need to observe their plants growing every few days. The students should have a final 50-minute block to write up the results of their experiment.

• Teachers should have the supplies to grow the crops in the classroom, including:

• Seeds

• Pots

• Soil

• Access to a water source

• Access to a window or heat lamps or ability to plant outside

• Teachers should have ways to control water. Students can individually water their own plants with either more or less water.

• The type of seed that could be used in the classroom is radishes.

• It is easy to grow, germinates relatively quickly and can be grown inside to control the weather conditions for the variables in the experiment.

• If the school has an outdoor garden, the radishes can be planted outside in the spring or fall.

• Peas are another recommended option.

Differentiation

• Students may need help with designing the experiment. The teacher can assign specific hypotheses to students in order to help facilitate the investigation.

• If materials are difficult to acquire, a non-lab resource could be Food and Farming.