6th Grade

This comprehensive session explores renewable energy sources, sustainable urban design, and building science principles while connecting these concepts to Alabama’s energy landscape. Students learn the science behind solar, wind, hydropower, biomass, and geothermal energy, examine Birmingham’s sustainability scorecard, calculate their ecological footprint, and discover how cities can reduce energy burden through smart design and weatherization. The session culminates in a hands-on solar-powered car building activity that demonstrates renewable energy principles in action.

This interactive session introduces middle school students to the fundamentals of energy history, nonrenewable resources, and electric vehicles. Students explore how humans have powered the world from fire to fossil fuels, examine Alabama’s unique energy landscape, and investigate the environmental impacts and solutions for our energy future. The session concludes with a hands-on energy audit activity where students use wattmeters and infrared cameras to identify “energy vampires” and energy leaks in their classroom.

This timeline activity guides students through the history of energy innovation from Ben Franklin’s 1752 kite experiment to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. Students explore how individual inventors, scientists, and organizations contributed to the industrial revolution and its lasting global impact on economies, societies, and politics. The lesson is offered in two versions—one with independent research and one using pre-made timeline cards—making it adaptable for different classroom settings and technology access. The activity addresses Alabama College and Career Ready Social Studies standards across multiple grade levels, covering industrialization’s impact on American life, technological inventions during the European Industrial Revolution, and the transition from agrarian society to industrial nation.

This interactive graphing game teaches students about renewable and non-renewable energy resources through hands-on data collection and histogram creation. Working in small groups, students use colored beads representing different energy sources to simulate energy extraction from the Earth, discovering firsthand how non-renewable resources deplete over successive rounds while renewable sources remain available. The lesson addresses Alabama College and Career Ready Standards in both mathematics (Data Analysis, Statistics, and Probability 24) and science (Earth and Human Activity 15), requiring students to represent numerical data graphically using histograms and analyze evidence to explain how consumption of natural resources affects Earth’s systems.