Positives

• There are buttons along the side of the resource for teachers to easily integrate it into Google Classroom or share it to social media.
• Teachers can find support materials on the page, such as teaching tips, a background essay, discussion questions, and handouts.
  

Additional Prerequisites

• Students and teachers may need a PBS Learning Media account to sign in to view the resource. Educators must sign up as a teacher for PBS and verify their email before logging in.
• Students may need the terms drought, snowpack, and marina defined before viewing the resource.
• If completing the worksheet, students should know how to support claims with evidence from data and textual information.

Differentiation

• Teachers may wish to begin the lesson by discussing drought and its effects in the students' home states.
• The printable student handout explains the map's organization, so English teachers may wish to have students create a paragraph of explanation and then share it as a think-pair-share activity.
• Since the three combined visualizations provide three different ways of looking at drought, teachers may wish to split students into three groups and then use the jigsaw method for small-group learning.  After the groups finalize their summaries, there can be a whole-class discussion utilizing the combined information.
• Students can research California's drought conditions over the last 50 years and discuss trends and patterns.
• The map is available in Spanish, but the worksheet is only in English. However, the Microsoft Word page that opens the document can translate the text into many languages.