This brief article highlights the ways that municipalities in Maine are funding and supporting projects and actions that address climate change, energy efficiency, and community resiliency.
Links to join the Community Resilience Partnership and learn more about grant funding are included.
Teaching Tips
Positives
The information is specific to Maine, allowing students to see local efforts and available grants in their state.
The article is brief and easy to understand.
Possible next steps are included to encourage students to take action.
Additional Prerequisites
Students should understand what a municipality is and how they can encourage their municipality to act.
Differentiation
Have more advanced students research the grant requirements and application process and present it along with background information about why taking action is important for municipalities and communities.
Have students read this as a bell-ringer and then ask students to write a short response to why community action to address global issues is important.
Younger students can discuss the green transportation options available to communities and have them make posters that encourage students to walk, skate, or ride their bikes whenever possible.
Science and engineering students learning about heat, energy transfers, and materials can discuss the energy efficiency issues of older buildings and research low-cost ways to prevent energy waste and improve insulation in buildings.
Scientist Notes
The Community Resilience Partnership program is highlighted in this resource, along with how it has helped Maine become more carbon-neutral and strengthened local governments and communities to adapt to climate change. Teachers should consider using this resource.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
HS-ESS3-4 Evaluate or refine a technological solution that reduces impacts of human activities on natural systems.
College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Standards
Dimension 2: Civics
D2.Civ.5.9-12 Evaluate citizens' and institutions' effectiveness in addressing social and political problems at the local, state, tribal, national, and/or international level.
Dimension 4: Taking Informed Action
D4.7.9-12 Assess options for individual and collective action to address local, regional, and global problems by engaging in self-reflection, strategy identification, and complex causal reasoning.
Common Core English Language Arts Standards (CCSS.ELA)
Reading: Informational Text (K-12)
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.6 Determine an author's point of view or purpose in a text and analyze how an author uses rhetoric to advance that point of view or purpose.
