Determining Threshold Limits 5.31 Climate and Farming. Each module focuses on a topic in the life, earth, or physical sciences. Each module consists of a student book and a teacher's guide. In themodule Climate and Farming, students learn how climatic conditions are analyzed and matched with the crop plants best suited to those conditions. The module emphasizes responding to climate changes rather than possible causes of climate change such as global warming.
Students learn what climate is and what factors affect it.
They analyze a series of data sets on temperature and rainfall, set up a long-term investigation of the effects of temperature on seed germination and plant growth, and make climatograms of various cities in the United States. Next, students look at how the characteristics that make up biomes have an effect on what actually lives in their environment, and they work with elementary genetics to get a sense of how crop plants can be bred to withstand certain climatic conditions. In the final activity, students draw on their research in climate and farming to plan a garden with plants especially suited to the local climate. Climate and Farming is divided into 6 activities that each take between 1 and 3 class periods to complete. Two short reading sections at the end of the module provide limited background information on biomes and on global warming.