Connecting for Health and Planet

Connecting for Heath and Planet: Grades 3-5 Activities

PLT’s Activity Collection provides content in support of an identified theme for a particular grade level. Designed to be flexible, the activities that comprise each collection can be used as individual, stand-alone lessons, or all together as a cohesive unit of instruction using a storyline technique.

For educators of students in grades 3-5, Connecting for Health invites learners to investigate how being outside—and among trees, specifically—provides people with many different physical, emotional, social, and learning benefits.

The three downloadable activities were developed with support from Nice-Pak and invite students to investigate how being outside—and among trees, specifically—provides people with many different physical, emotional, social, and learning benefits:

• Get Outside!: Students investigate the physical and emotional benefits of working or playing outside.
• Poet-Tree: Students explore the benefits of being outside as they make observations of how trees make them feel. This activity also incorporates traditional knowledge with a gratitude walk.
• Helping Hands: Students plan and carry out a project to improve a shared, local outdoor space.

How do trees connect with human and environmental health?

A growing body of research confirms that children are healthier, happier, more creative, and have better knowledge retention when they consistently play and learn outdoors. Some benefits of time outdoors for youth include:

• Increased attentiveness and better recollection of information, even after they go back inside.
• Improved performance on tests and other external measures of knowledge gains.
• Greater feelings of competence and motivation to learn.
• More frequent and more effective conflict management, communication, and peer cooperation.

While much of the research focuses on children, there is also evidence that being outdoors is good for adults as well. Plus, an additional benefit of spending time outdoors is an increased investment in these places and spaces by the people who experience them.

Learning Progressions

Storylines provide connectedness and continuity to individual activities and can serve as the instructional glue that holds areas of knowledge and skills together. The activities in Connecting for Health and Planet may be linked together into a unit of instruction using a storyline technique, such as the one that follows.

• Guiding Question: How does being outside benefit people?
• Storyline: Being outside and among trees provides people with many different physical, emotional, social, and learning benefits.

Classroom educators and nonformal educators alike need to ensure that instruction helps diverse learners meet rigorous academic benchmarks. Each PLT activity displays explicit connections to practices and concepts mandated by the following national academic standards. See example below.

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