Vocabulary is a bigger factor in climate education than most curricula acknowledge. The wrong word introduces confusion that takes twenty minutes to untangle. The right one lets a nine-year-old reason about a system.
Words we replaced
We stopped saying evapotranspiration and started saying the water plants breathe out. We stopped saying anthropogenic and started saying caused by people. We stopped saying mitigation and adaptation as a pair, because students consistently confused them, and instead described stopping the problem from growing and getting ready for changes already happening.
Words we kept
We kept aquifer, watershed, and groundwater, because these describe things students can picture and because vague substitutes made the concepts fuzzier. We kept data, and students took to it quickly, especially when they were generating their own.
We also kept uncertainty. It is tempting to simplify science into settled facts, but students handle the idea of a range better than adults expect, and it inoculates them against the argument that scientists cannot be trusted because they revise estimates.
The general rule
Use plain language for processes and precise language for things. A student who can point at a watershed on a map and explain in ordinary words how water travels through it understands more than one who can recite a definition.