Sea Level Rise and Climate Change Demo

• This lesson plan provides a podcast, student worksheet, and two hands-on experiments that demonstrate how melting land ice and the thermal expansion of water contribute to sea level rise. 

Positives

• The educator's guide is detailed and well-organized.
• Students will enjoy participating in the experiments.
  

Additional Prerequisites

• The downloadable "student pages" in the educator's guide include a number of questions, but the pages do not leave space for students to record their answers.
• The experiments require some materials to be gathered ahead of time, such as ice cubes, containers, straws, and water bottles with lids.
  

Differentiation

• Before beginning the experiments, have students hypothesize what they think will happen.  Advanced students can incorporate this into scientific method lessons and write a scientific paper describing their research.
  
• After this lesson, social studies and geography classes could learn more about how and why certain coastal areas of the United States are experiencing faster sea level rise than other parts of the world.
• History classes could research how and why port officials were measuring the sea level long before scientists began to record data using GPS.
• Other resources on this topic include this PBS video on how Miami is dealing with sea level rise, this NASA video about how global warming is causing sea levels to rise, and this sea level rise viewer that provides sea level rise data for the coastal United States.

This resource addresses the listed standards. To fully meet standards, search for more related resources.