Lesson 1: Find Your Entry Point

Lesson 1

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Learning Outcomes

Students will:

Identify causes and effects of climate change.

Describe important climate change terms and concepts.

Explore a range of storytelling techniques and examples of successful CIC projects.

Identify students’ relationships with the land, local communities, and their passions.

How do you feel about the role you play in our changing climate?

How can you tie your passions and skill sets into addressing climate change at a local level?

What techniques and tools do you have at your disposal to help tell your story effectively?

How has climate change affected you, your family, and your community, and what solutions do you propose to address it?

Ask students to document their experience from the start. Photos and videos from these initial steps can aid in the storytelling process. Students and teachers should add photos and videos to their Canva Pro profile as “assets” that can be used in a final project. To that end, we have included a Find Your Entry Point worksheet that we’ll ask you to have students fill out and keep for use in Lesson #3.
Before starting this lesson, you will want to give students an overview of the curriculum and the showcase, so they are oriented and understand that arch of the project.
For many students, finding their entry point may not be clear from the outset. Identifying where to begin can be the hardest part. Work with students to brainstorm how their passions and interests might work together to create a solution that is meaningful for them. Here are some examples:
- Recent forest fires in their area changed the landscape of their favorite hike so they are going to learn about wildfires and fire safety. They are good at painting, so they gather their neighbors and together they make a large, colorful sign and put it up in their neighborhood.
- They used to grow corn with their grandparents and the crops have gotten smaller every year so they are going to research gardening projects in the area and how to combat negative effects on family/community farms. They love to sing, so they plan to make a song with helpful tips.
- An endangered species in a nearby wilderness area is something they are passionate about, and video games are something they are good at so they create a proposal for a video game where the user is tasked to protect this endangered species from the multiple threats it faces due to climate change.

Find Your Entry Point Worksheet

Optional Extension Activities:

Supplemental Resources:

Free Wordcloud Generator

Show and discuss the video “Friendly Guide to Climate Change” (16:52) by Henrik Kniberg.
Follow up this video by discussing a few of the basic principles of climate change.
- Greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere have dramatically increased since the industrial revolution due to the burning of fossil fuels.
- Increased greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere lead to higher global temperatures because they store and radiate heat back down to earth.
- Increased global temperatures have resulted in catastrophic climate change indicators like rising sea levels, worsening wildfires, aridification and drought, and many others.
- Climate change indicators are a set of parameters that scientists can use to gauge our changing climate. They can be tracked over time, providing data that indicates a change that can be directly correlated with greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. Examples include rising temperatures, rising sea levels, and arctic ice and glacier melt.

Note that the storytelling technique used in this video is called “mind-mapping.” This is a technique that students will use in Lesson #3 when brainstorming their own climate change solutions.

Start your CIC experience by identifying where you want to focus your research. We encourage you to contemplate both how climate change impacts your life, environment, and community now and to consider the historical implications in and of the communities you are from. You can use this worksheet if you are working independently or if you are working with a group.*

*If you are working in a group follow the same prompts, then choose and add up to three words that describe the spirit of your responses to the group Wordcloud, which can be generated for free here. A word cloud’s results will help identify a focus area that resonates with most participants.

Contemplate and discuss your responses to the following items before starting the Find Your Entry Point Worksheet.

Stories from your lifetime
Stories your family passes down
Stories you hear from adults/elders in your community
Stories shared within your culture
Where do you see yourself in the next 20 years? How might climate change impact this vision?

Hold onto this worksheet for Lesson #3.

Use the Find Your Entry Point Worksheet to answer the questions as a free-write. Freewriting is the practice of writing down all your thoughts without stopping and without regard for spelling, grammar, or any of the usual rules for writing. Give yourself enough time to answer each question thoughtfully.

Storytelling Video Examples:

Climate Crisis: Act Now or Regret Forever (4:00) – 2025 Best Storytelling Prize- High School.
Saving Medicine (3:55): Indigenous perspective on climate change and CAVU’s Outstanding High School Entry, 2024.

Discussion prompts:

Examine storytelling elements in different cultural contexts with the class as a means to help students develop their approach to CIC project videos scripts and formats.
What caught your attention most in these videos?
Could you see yourself telling a story about climate resilience in a new way after watching any of these videos?
What did you notice that was similar in these approaches to storytelling? What was different?
What would you add if someone asked you what makes an impactful story?

If time allows, teachers may decide to include one or more of these activities to reinforce the concepts taught in today’s lesson and provide students with additional opportunities to learn about adaptation and mitigation strategies used in their local area and around the world.

Share “I Am From: Kid’s Voices” poems created by children in Kenya as part of the “Kid’s Voices” program.
- KIDS’ VOICES© is a cool way of introducing children to the world of classic literature using the I AM FROM storytelling framework. Each story within these vibrant pages not only entertains and inspires young minds, but also subtly encourages them to explore the transformative potential of their own actions as they write their own stories and share their unique identities. Through these narratives, young readers are invited to dream, learn and grow with the potential of igniting a lasting change not only in their lives, but also of the lives they touch.
Guide students through the writing process for creating their own “I am From” poem using the Freewrite for “I am From” Poem handout, produced by Teddy Warria.
Guide students through the drafting and revision process of their poems, providing opportunities to collaborate with classmates as they go.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.L.3

Apply knowledge of language to understand how language functions in different contexts, to make effective choices for meaning or style, and to comprehend more fully when reading or listening

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.L.

Acquire and use accurately a range of general academic and domainspecific words and phrases sufficient for reading, writing, speaking, and listening at the college and career readiness level; demonstrate independence in gathering vocabulary knowledge when encountering an unknown term important to comprehension or expression.