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I did not come up with this idea; however, I felt it was worth sharing. My son brought home a Home Electricity Monitor that monitored our usage of electricity. He had a data sheet where he recorded our daily usage. He was required to make notations of which appliances were on when the usage would spike or drop. It was a real eye-opener for our entire family. We all became engaged in walking around the house turning things off to see the number drop.

I think this is one project that sucked our entire family in and one that we will never forget participating in or the lessons we all learned from this activity.

Thanks to his AIG teacher, we are all much more aware and conscientious.

Divide your class into two groups and then take turns asking the teams various questions about carbon footprints. Each right answer earns a point; if one team fails to get the answer, offer it to the other. If both fail, give the point to “CO2.” High score wins; don’t let “CO2” come out on top!

Here are some good sample questions: 

1. What is the C in CO2? (carbon)

2. The sun emits radiation. We feel it on Earth as …? (heat)

3. Name two greenhouse gases. (carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, ozone,

nitrous oxide)

4. Greenhouse gases get their name because of what they do to our atmosphere.

What is that? (heat it; trap heat; raise temperature)

5. If all of the Earth’s greenhouse gas was suddenly removed from the atmosphere,

the planet’s temperature would be much, much …? (colder)

6. The measure of how much carbon dioxide emissions you’ve helped produce is

called your …? (carbon footprint)

7. Fossil fuels emit carbon when burned. Name two kinds. (coal, oil, natural gas)

8. Humans breathe out carbon dioxide. Name two things that absorb it from the

atmosphere. (plants, oceans)

9. Name two renewable energy sources. (solar, wind, hydroelectric, biomass)

10. Name one way to reduce your carbon footprint. (Various answers are

acceptable, but the best will focus on consuming less energy. Bonus points for

creativity!)

Go to Earth911.com and enter your ZIP code and the word “plastic” to discover what materials your curbside recycling service covers, or what can be recycled at nearby facilities. Once you have a list, have each student make a poster that they can hang on their fridge at home to remind family members of what’s recyclable.

Have your students go home and do a "Home Energy Inspection" too see how much energy their home is wasting.  Encourage them to check four areas:

Lighting: Unlike incandescent bulbs that heat a metal filament to produce light, CFLs use far less energy by running a current through a tube containing argon gas and mercury vapor. This process uses about 75% less energy than incandescents, and the bulbs last 10 times longer.

Appliances: Appliances like computers and TVs still drain power while turned off. This “standby power” accounts for 5-10% of energy used in homes, making it responsible for almost 1% of global CO 2 emissions.

Recycling: The United States recycles 32% of its waste; this saves an amount of greenhouse gas equivalent to removing 39.6 million cars from the road. Increasing the rate to 35% would reduce emissions by an additional 5.2 million metric tons.

Cooling: Home heating and cooling systems are the largest energy consumers in the home, so saving energy here can have the biggest effect the fastest. U.S. electricity consumption totaled nearly 3,741 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) in 2009.

That’s about 13 times greater than 1950.

Then, once they bring their inspections back to school, discuss how they can reduce energy usage in the areas above and have each student write an "energy reduction plan" for their own home.

Divide students into groups and assign them a different source of energy (ie. water, wind, natural gas, electricity, etc.) Have each group look into what are the benefits of each? What are the challenges that keep us from relying on them 100%?  Then, have each group create a poster about thier energy source and make a video about thier research.  Hint:  The US Department of Energy has some great links that will help in their research.