Earth Hour - Switch Off to Join the Future (Part 1)

Students explore what they understand by the term ‘climate change’ and work together to define some of the actions we can all take to fight climate change. Following this they work as a class to identify how the headlines of news articles are written to draw in the reader. Using this knowledge they then work to create headlines for a range of climate change action news stories. Finally, students are asked to write their own story and headline about an action they are already doing to help stop climate change. This lesson may be followed by Earth Hour – Switch off to join the future – Years 3 & 4 – Lesson 2.

Essential questions:

• What is climate change? How does climate change affect our planet?
• What actions can we all take to limit climate change? Am I already doing some of these actions?
• Why do news stories have a headline? What are the tricks to creating a great headline for a news story?
• What is Earth Hour? How does Earth Hour spread news about climate change?