What Makes Cities Hot?
Lesson Plans
Grades3, 4, 5Science
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Provided by My NASA Data
What it is
- In this hands-on experiment, students learn why different materials experience differences in surface temperatures by comparing how materials such as pavement, buildings, and vegetation absorb heat and contribute to the urban heat island effect.
- Students will learn how to conduct a science experiment, make observations, and draw conclusions from those observations.
Teaching tips
Positives
- Students will enjoy going outside to take data.
- The student worksheets are simple and clearly outline what students should do.
Prerequisites
- Teachers will need to prepare and gather materials ahead of time, including thermometers, colored construction paper, aluminum foil, sand, sponges, clipboards, and printed data sheets and data tables for students.
- Teachers should plan to do this activity on a warm, sunny day, though the resource does give suggestions for implementation on other days.
Differentiation & Implementation
- After discussing the urban heat island effect, students can use what they learned about how different materials heat up to design a solution that would cool down urban areas.
- Teachers can make connections to climate change and how rising temperatures will make cities even hotter. Teachers can transition into a conversation about the importance of mitigating climate change as much as possible.
- To support writing skills, teachers can have students use their worksheets to turn their raw claim, evidence, and reasoning into a polished short paragraph.
- This video can help drive home some of the points discussed and discovered in the activity.
From the scientist review
This lesson includes a lab where students measure the temperatures of different materials in different locations, demonstrating the factors that affect air and surface temperatures. The lab findings then explain what urban heat islands are and how they form. Urban heat islands are often discussed in relation to climate change, as they are a simple example of how humans can change the environment of an area. Since urban heat islands warm an area, they increase the likelihood of extreme heat, which can cause health problems for people, in addition to negative impacts on the environment. This effect and its impacts are predicted to increase as the climate changes. The information presented is accurate and this resource is recommended for teaching.
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