In This Issue

• Sustainability Unit for Middle School
• Find the Right Facing the Future Curriculum
• Curriculum Highlight: Deep Space 3000
• Action Idea: Sustainable Summer
• Professional Development Opportunities
• Ways to Get Involved with Facing the Future
• Featured Partner: Explorer West Middle School

Quick Facing the Future Links

• Facing the Future Home
• Curriculum Finder
• Free Curriculum Downloads
• Standards Alignment
• What Educators Say about Facing the Future Curriculum
• Our Impact on Student Achievement
• Service Learning
• Professional Development

Just Out: Sustainability Unit for Middle School
Understanding Sustainability is a flexible, self-contained 1-2 week curriculum unit aligned with national science standards for middle school. Drawn from Engaging Students Through Global Issues, the curriculum's hands-on activities explore issues such as energy, water scarcity, and systems. Lessons link to action projects, including a sustainability audit in which students access their school's energy, water, trash, and transportation use. The unit includes sequenced activities for each day, student readings, homework assignments, critical thinking questions, and assessment rubrics.

“I wish more science teachers had these units in their hands. The lessons really allow the students an opportunity to see how this affects them, which is sometimes difficult to do as a middle schooler.”
- Middle school math and science teacher, University Place, WA

The unit is available on a CD for $24.95. Thanks to generous funding, versions of the unit are available free of charge to teachers in Alaska and Washington State. Download a lesson overview and table of contents of the unit.

Find the Right Facing the Future Curriculum for You!
Looking for the perfect curriculum for summer school or next year's classes? To help you navigate the growing array of Facing the Future offerings, we have developed an online curriculum finder.

Search for lessons, units, and readings for your classes with a quick click of a button. Simply plug in your grade, subject, and the topic you are teaching to receive a list of relevant Facing the Future materials along with a brief description of the topic you have chosen and recommended websites for further information.

Curriculum Highlight: Deep Space 3000
Here's a fun lesson to spark your students' thinking at the end of the school year! Divide your class into groups of 4-5 and tell them that they are on a mission to design a large spaceship that can support human life while orbiting around the sun for 3,000 years. Students cannot use anything from outside the ship – except solar energy – nor remove anything from the ship except heat.

Have groups brainstorm basic human needs (food, water, air, energy, waste, disposal, governance, quality of life, etc.) and then come up with a design to meet these needs. Provide each group with butcher paper and markers to draw their spaceship. Allow students to share their designs and reflect on the exercise, asking them which need was most difficult to meet and how the earth is different from their spaceship. Students may be surprised to discover that the earth, like the spaceship, is a "closed system." Our challenge is to create a world that supports healthy and happy generations into the future.

A full version of this lesson is available in Understanding Sustainability as well as in Engaging Students Through Global Issues. Many other Facing the Future lessons are available to download for free.

Action Idea: Sustainable Summer
Before they leave school for the year, have your students come up with specific actions to make their summer more sustainable. Maybe they'll pledge to turn their air conditioner down a few degrees, walk or bike instead of driving for outings that are close to home, or spend some of their vacation volunteering at a local nonprofit.

Students can come up with ideas from a Facing the Future lesson such as Deep Space 3000 (above) or visit the following websites for inspiration:

• Going Green's A-Z List of Ideas
• New American Dream
• YES! Magazine's Sustainability Articles
• Facing the Future's Fast Facts and Quick Actions

Professional Development Opportunities
This summer Facing the Future staff and Peer Educators will be presenting workshops in Austin, Boulder, Chicago, Seattle, and Tacoma. For up-to-date information on workshops and links to conference websites, visit our online workshop calendar.

Facing the Future staff are also available to come to your school or district to present a professional development workshop for teachers. Learn more on our website. If you would like to schedule a workshop, please email kim@facingthefuture.org or call 206-264-1503.

Here's what one educator said about the inservice workshop Facing the Future presented at her school:

“I enjoyed all of the workshop. I have been looking for a way to get global issues into my classroom for a while, and this gives me the tools to do it.”
- Middle school science teacher, Norwalk, CA

Ways to Get Involved with Facing the Future
During the summer we will be recruiting Classroom Partners and Peer Educators for the 2008-2009 school year. Visit our website for more information about these programs. If you would like to be notified when application materials become available, please send an email to cecilia@facingthefuture.org.

Featured Partner: Explorer West Middle School
Facing the Future works closely with Explorer West Middle School to give students the academic, creative, and social skills required for a sustainable future. Each year, the faculty chooses a sustainability theme to integrate into their subjects. This year's theme was sustainable design. Students gained an introduction to the theme through Facing the Future lessons such as Deep Space 3000 (see description above), readings from Cradle to Cradle, and by creating their own 'zine on topics ranging from permaculture to sustainable lipstick. Students conducted audits of the school's garbage, recycling, energy and water use, following up with steps to improve the school’s systems. Students also designed and built a native plants garden.

The work culminated in a festival featuring skits on the "greenwashing" of sustainability, a performance with instruments made from found or recycled materials, research projects on sustainable design in construction and consumer products (including a study of the sustainability of common bowls - see picture), and student-powered chariot races. Students also raised nearly $2,000 for the Make It Right Foundation to help build sustainably designed homes for Hurricane Katrina victims.

Read about how Facing the Future has worked with some other schools and organizations.