Human Impacts Part 1

Overview

Transition In: This is the launch of the MBER-Living Earth sequence. Hopefully you have spent some time with your students “setting the stage” for their year of model-based reasoning.

We examine some headlines taken from a range of news sources in recent times and wonder what humans are doing to the Earth. We develop a driving question for the year that is something along the lines of “Are humans to blame for the environmental problems we see on Earth today?” We spend a few minutes brainstorming some solutions we have heard about and some teachers will use this opportunity to launch the (optional) year-long Human Impacts Project.

Transition Out: After developing our driving question for the year, we realize we need to understand more about the Earth, how it formed and how it changed, in order to get a start on our driving question. This leads us into the next unit triangle where we develop a model for Formation of the Earth.