On occasion we get phone calls from teachers asking if we do programs, or have curriculum, for kindergartens or students under the age of third grade.  At this point in time we do not, and much of that is because of the difficulty in creating educational materials on climate change that is age appropriate.  At the Will Steger Foundation we have found the Guidelines for K-12 Global Climate Change Ed created the National Association for Environmental Education and the National Wildlife Federation helpful.  The Guidelines state:

Providing effective global climate change K-12 education is best done in developmental stages that are grouped according to age levels.    These stages are vitally important to climate change education because of the subject’s deep underlying complexity." and furthermore, "the size and extent of the global climate change problem can seem overwhelming to younger children who do not yet grasp all the possibilities for solutions. Younger children also are less able to grasp the potential of collective societal-scale action or that individuals can make a useful contribution to such large scale challenges.

In addition to this, David Sobel's Ladder of Environmental Responsibility ("Climate Change Meets Ecophobia." Connect, November/December 2007, p.20.) can be helpful when determining how best to implement an environmental education curriculum in the schools.  In the Ladder he shows that starting with very local and hands on issues in the early grades and building to more complex international issues is a model that can implemented in an elementary school.