Explore Your Environment: K-8 Activity Guide offers educators a wide variety of engaging, hands-on activities, organized into grade bands, K-2, 3-5, and 6-8 about trees and forests, wildlife, water, climate change, stewardship, and more.
For educators of students in grades 3-5, Connecting for Health and Planet invites learners to investigate how being outside—and among trees, specifically—provides people with many different physical, emotional, social, and learning benefits.
Never underestimate the power of a tree! In addition to giving us an amazing array of paper and wood products, trees provide a host of other benefits—from shading our backyards to reducing air pollution to helping stabilize the global climate.
Every living thing has a habitat—a place that meets its needs. Human beings’ habitat is the community in which they live.
Tree species can be identified by looking at several different features: leaves, bark, twigs, flowers, fruit, and seeds. Even the overall shape of a tree can give clues to the tree’s identity.
Writing and sharing poems gives students an opportunity to express their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in creative and artistic ways. You can do this activity in combination with Adopt a Tree, to allow students to explore their adopted tree.
Students learn about the papermaking process by trying it themselves. Students will find out that they can make their own paper and that their product is practical, as well as beautiful.
This Learn About Forest activity is perfect for forest sector professionals leading educational events, career days, or field visits with youth. Learners identify benefits we receive from trees and participate in a tree-planting event.
Even though students may be very familiar with trees, they may not have thought much about the actual structure of a tree. In this activity, your students will go outdoors or view pictures to take a closer look at trees and their parts.
Students investigate and report on their connection with a special place and with their greater community.