Live Virtual Teacher Workshops
Hosted by STEMTeachersNYC
Teaching Indoor Air Quality for Elementary Students
A “Turn-Key” Unit that Connects Climate Data to Daily Life
Teaching Indoor Air Quality for Elementary Students

Americans spend 90% of their time indoors, yet indoor environments are rarely the focus of elementary environmental education.
Join us for a virtual workshop exploring The Great Indoors, a free, ready-to-go unit that uses the 5E model and place-based learning to help grades 3–5 students investigate the air quality of their own indoor environments. During the workshop, you will experience a model lesson from the student perspective, dig into the unit’s ready-to-use materials, and discuss strategies for integrating indoor environmental health into existing elementary science instruction. The unit culminates in a design thinking challenge where students apply what they have learned to improve their own indoor environments.
By the end of the session, you will leave with a clear picture of how to implement the unit within limited instructional time, confidence in teaching indoor environmental health concepts, and strategies for building student action competence so young learners feel empowered to make real changes at home. You will also leave with immediate access to a complete Google Drive-based resource aligned to NGSS.
No prior experience with environmental health content is needed.
The session is virtual – please plan to join on a laptop or tablet (strongly preferred over joining on your phone) to easily access the session and materials.
This workshop is geared towards upper elementary students.
A “Turn-Key” Unit that Connects Climate Data to Daily Life
When climate patterns shift, the effects don’t stop at the front door. This session explores what happens when they come inside.
Climate Variability and Human Health is a free, turn-key unit for grades 6-8 (with clear pathways to scale up to high school) that helps students investigate how changes in climate patterns can lead to flooding, wildfires, and increased pest populations, and what that means for indoor environments and human health. The unit follows Mira, a middle schooler who notices outdoor environmental changes affecting people she loves across the country: flooding in Florida, tick propagation in Minnesota, wildfire smoke in Oregon. Through case studies, data analysis, and CER (Claim-Evidence-Reasoning) activities, students trace cause-and-effect relationships from shifting climate patterns to regional weather events to real health impacts, and explore prevention and mitigation strategies they can act on.
In this 90-minute session, participants experience the wildfires weather shock as students would: reading the Portland case study, analyzing EPA and Our World in Data wildfire trend data, exploring how smoke infiltrates homes, and constructing a CER response. We then discuss the pedagogical moves behind the sequence and how to facilitate it in your own classroom.
Participants leave with the complete unit (free, immediately via Google Drive), a replicable model for case-based climate education, and concrete strategies for integrating causal reasoning and data analysis into existing science or EE programming at the middle or high school level.
No special materials or prior experience required. The session is virtual – please plan to join on a laptop or tablet (strongly preferred over joining on your phone) to easily access the session and materials.
This workshop is geared towards middle and high school teachers.