Working with the system can be tricky! Like many of our other school grantees, the teacher lead at Truro Middle School had to figure out a way the project could be fit into the school’s science curriculum so students could work on it during class. She ended up creating her own multidisciplinary unit on food security, environmentalism, and energy so that she could get the project approved by administration. While every province has different requirements, check to see if baseline curriculum-aligned lesson plans already exist on the topic of your project! You can find a list of ones we think are great here!

Climate Quiz Highlight: We believe in the power of project-based learning to not only teach skills, but also literacy! This is why we give our grantees a short climate literacy quiz to give to their students both before and after the project happens, to see how it improves their climate knowledge. For Truro Middle School, climate literacy definitely improved for the students that had directly and indirectly engaged with their aeroponics project. For example:
For the question “What is the goal of net-zero?” 26% more students answered the question correctly in the “post-quiz” they took after project implementation.
For the question “What do greenhouse gases do” there was a 32% increase in correct answers.
These increases in correct answers between the pre and post project quizzes demonstrate that project-based learning can be very effective at increasing technical climate science knowledge.