6 leçons de classe pour explorer les thèmes de l’année mondiale 8 milliards

octobre 8, 2026

Did you know we offer free lesson plans designed to help students dive deeper into this year’s World of 8 Billion contest topics?

There is a downloadable lesson for both middle and high school students on each topic: Extreme Weather, City Planning, and Fresh Water Use. The lessons are a great way to build students’ background knowledge, spark curiosity about the contest topics, and get them thinking about potential solutions before they begin creating their videos. They can be incorporated into your curriculum at any point during the school year or used as a launching point for the filmmaking project.

Looking to collaborate? If a topic doesn’t align directly with your subject area, consider partnering with a colleague whose curriculum does. Science teachers can work with English teachers; social studies teachers with communication; or bring in the teacher lead from your forensics or debate club to assist!

Below you’ll find links to all six lesson plans, along with information about the skills and content knowledge students develop through each activity will help their video submission. Please note that while the lessons are designated for middle school (MS) or high school (HS), most can be adapted for different grade levels by adjusting or scaffolding the discussion questions.

City Planning Lesson Plans

Douleurs à la croissance dans le Texas Hill Country (MS) has students explore the effects of urban growth and sprawl. Through a mock city council meeting, your middle schoolers will take on stakeholder roles and use evidence to debate how the city should approach future development. This engaging activity helps students examine the challenges and opportunities that come with growing cities. Encourage students to consider how their community has changed over time and how local development decisions are made as inspiration for their videos.

Croître plus intelligemment (HS) asks students to create plans for an undeveloped area within a city. Using smart growth principles, your high schoolers will consider sustainable urban development strategies and evaluate how planning decisions can improve access to infrastructure and reduce sprawl. Students also consider any negative impacts of smart growth, including how limiting urban sprawl may affect housing affordability. Have students investigate smart growth principles that were used in their own city’s development plans and how those principles, or lack thereof, impact residents of your community.

Freshwater Use Lesson Plans

Eau, eau partout (MS) helps students visualize how little of Earth’s abundant water supply is fresh water through a water distribution demonstration. This lesson also introduces personal water footprints and explores how much water is used indirectly in many of their everyday activities. Inspire your middle school students to identify sustainable solutions for conserving water as individuals. Then broaden the discussion to examine how large-scale conservation efforts in agriculture and industry can help sustainably preserve fresh water for a growing population.

Que le puissant fleuve soit avec nous (HS) examines the rights of groups and individuals to limited freshwater sources. In this lesson, high school students take on the roles of different stakeholders and use argumentation skills to develop a plan to equitably share water from the Colorado River. Encourage students to research additional water agreements around the world for a deeper understanding of fresh water access and availability challenges. Then have them brainstorm sustainable solutions to these challenges around sharing fresh water.

Extreme Weather Lesson Plans

Dans The News : Recherche pour demain (MS) has students synthesize and summarize information from credible sources to create a newscast, where their focus can be on extreme weather events. This lesson gives your middle schoolers an opportunity to jumpstart their video research and lets them practice building a compelling message. Use the rubric in the lesson plan to model how to review and revise their presentations. Then reinforce the importance of using the judging judge’s rubric to improve their contest videos before submitting.

Carbon Crunch (HS) helps students practice building well-rounded arguments based on data and evidence for their videos. In this lesson, your high schoolers will engage in an interactive discussion where they analyze and interpret carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. Then they will identify the social, economic, and environmental factors that influence a country’s vulnerability to extreme weather events brought on by climate change and its readiness to mitigate the impacts. As an extension, students could identify sustainable global actions that could reduce the disproportionate negative impacts on countries that have the lowest emissions.