Engage: Gather and display some artifacts of global warming: photos of polluted skies and melting ice caps, grocery bags (fabric, plastic and paper), advertisements for hybrid vehicles, etc. to intrigue students about the products people are creating or advocating to reduce global warming. Explain to students that they will be studying global warming, its causes and effects, and efforts to reduce global warming. Engage students in the study of global warming by showing this video at Global Warming 101. Demonstrate your own interest, and put together a learning center that has books and articles on global warming and activism. Include graphics and a list of websites about global warming. Post and discuss the essential questions.

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Activate Prior Knowledge: Create a list of the academic vocabulary essential for this part of the project: global warming, climate zones, greenhouse effect, greenhouse gases, and climate change. Have students break into groups and assign each group the responsibility of explaining these terms to the rest of the class. Spend five minutes discussing one or two of the words and their definitions each day. Keep track on the wall of how many times students use the vocabulary words correctly. Be sure to use each of the words daily. View a tutorial about the greenhouse effect. Then take the global warming quiz as a class. Chart your students? scores and talk about the incorrect answers.

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Build Context: Explain to your students that they will exchange emails with students who live in another country as they learn about concerns and strategies about global warming that occur in that country. Since students will be working in pairs, pair up students so that they will be ready to begin. Each pair of students will be matched with a pair of students in your partner ePals' classroom.