Velcro Tempestry

As with our Punch Needle Tempestry project, we have to give credit to the brilliance of Asy and Emily at The Tempestry Project  for coming up with this intuitive way to visualize climate change in color. Velcro Tempestries are a great way to engage students for a shorter time period than the Punch Needle Tempestries, which took about 6 weeks of class time to complete. These projects are based on a different color palette--Ed Hawkins' Warming Stripes. Using data for a variety of global and US locations, high school biology students in one class period were able to create a gallery of Velcro Tempestries that they used to compare and contrast the nuances and speed of climate change. 

Velcro Tempestries

• Every 2-3 students should have a gallon ziplock bag of yarn strands in the 16 different colors of the Warming Stripes.  

  • Please encourage them to be tidy and to put all 16 little baggies with yarn back inside the gallon bag at the end so that the activity is reset for the next group. 

• Each student should choose a Data Worksheet* from a location of their choice. Encourage students to do all of the different data sets so that there's at least one from each location--there are 7 locations to choose from. 

• Once everyone has their datasheet, they can start laying strips of yarn on their velcro piece until they've completed the dataset.

• Do a gallery walk once everyone is done to compare trends across locations. 

Please email Alexandra Rose at scidisceducation@colorado.edu for access to the Data Worksheets.