Students investigate how consumer and citizen choices can influence larger solutions to global warming by studying responsible consumption, renewable energy, clean water, and habitat protection. Through hands-on work with Clean San Diego, a solar company, a recycling center, and a nature center or park ranger, they build evidence from sorting challenges, simple solar models, field observations, and community research. They use that learning to create an interactive museum-style community exhibit with games, artifacts, models, posters, and demonstrations that teach visitors practical ways to protect water, land, oceans, and climate. The experience builds critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and self-direction as students revise their work through check-ins, rehearsals, reflection, journals, and a public exhibition for students and families.

Students will explain, using evidence, how consumer and citizen choices affect climate change, clean water, energy use, waste, and habitats on land and in oceans. They will investigate responsible consumption by sorting materials, tracing how products are reused, recycled, repaired, or repurposed, and evaluating how companies and communities can reduce environmental harm. Students will build and test simple renewable energy and conservation models, use observations and data from partners and field experiences to design a community solution, and revise their work through feedback. They will also strengthen collaboration, communication, reflection, and self-direction by preparing interactive museum stations and presenting their ideas clearly to families and community members.

Students will create project journals, field observation notes, waste-sorting records, and simple solar and habitat investigation models as they build understanding over time. In teams, they will develop interactive museum pieces such as waste-sorting games, reuse-repair-repurpose matching challenges, artifact displays, mini habitat protection challenges, and hands-on experiments that connect consumer choices to clean water, renewable energy, and healthier land and oceans. By the end, each team will present a community solution exhibit piece—a model, poster, prototype, or demonstration table—showing how people and companies can make choices that reduce pollution and address global warming. Together, these pieces will form a student-created interactive museum for families and community partners to explore.

Begin with the global warming slide deck and short video, then invite students to do a quick notice/wonder protocol about how consumer and citizen choices affect water, energy, land, and living things. Set up a mini provocation museum with a trash-sorting challenge, a simple solar model demo, and habitat artifacts or photos so teams can rotate through hands-on stations and record questions. Invite a guest from Clean San Diego or the recycling center to introduce a local problem connected to waste and pollution, and have students discuss how companies and communities share responsibility for solutions. Close with a class brainstorm around the essential questions and have students place sticky notes on which problem they most want to investigate for the museum exhibit.

Host a one-hour family and community interactive museum where student teams run rotating stations with waste-sorting games, simple solar model demonstrations, habitat protection artifacts, and try-it-out challenges about reuse, repair, recycling, and repurposing. Invite Clean San Diego, the recycling center, the neighborhood solar company, and a nature center or park ranger to attend, ask questions, and give feedback as students explain how consumer and citizen choices can protect water, land, oceans, and climate. Organize the space like a community solution exhibit with models, posters, field observation evidence, and hands-on experiments so every visitor participates rather than only watching. End with a short reflection wall or exit card where visitors name one solution they will try and students share one content skill and one collaboration skill they strengthened.