Family Resources
Take students inside global climate leader, Trane Technologies, where their employees are using sustainable solutions to create the systems you count on for comfortable, energy-efficient indoor air. Interactive educator and family activities bring lessons to life by having students engage with, discuss, and ultimately ideate solutions to real-world sustainability issues.
Goal Setting
FAMILY ACTIVITY
Grades 6-8
Students work with their families on a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Bound) goal for creating a more sustainable future in their own neighborhood. Together they will identify a problem, create a solution, and work toward accomplishing their goal.
EDUCATOR ACTIVITY
Grades 6-8
45 minutes
Work with students to understand local sustainability issues and the fundamentals of SMART goal setting. Then, facilitate a student discussion of SMART goals to solve a sustainability problem in their community.
Urban Heat Islands
FAMILY ACTIVITY
Grades 6-8
Students will explain the urban heat island effect they learned about in class and brainstorm one action they can take, as a family, to help mitigate the problem. Together, students and their families will come to understand how their individual actions affect their local environment.
EDUCATOR ACTIVITY
Grades 6-8
45 minutes
First, students learn what an urban heat island is and how to identify whether they are living in an area affected by one. Then they will engage in a discussion about what they can do to address the issue and cool down neighborhoods.
Sustainability in the News
FAMILY ACTIVITY
Grades 6-8
In this family activity, students and their families will examine their media literacy and learn to apply a more critical lens to the information they ingest. They will then apply what they’ve learned to identify reliable sources of information for researching a hypothetical purchase of a new family car.
EDUCATOR ACTIVITY
Grades 6-8
45 minutes
Students will differentiate misinformation and untrustworthy news sites from reliable and credible information sources. With this new understanding, they will use the C.A.R.S. method to critically evaluate a sustainability issue of their choosing.