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.
Using data collected from Mauna Loa, students graph changes in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) over the course of several decades and identify possible reasons for those changes.
Our nation’s forests are managed to support different outcomes. Students learn how forests can be managed to meet human and environmental needs and examine national parks to identify challenges that forest managers face meeting different needs.
The energy we use at home, school, or work enhances our lives, but it also often contributes to air and water pollution, wildlife and habitat loss, and climate change.
By reading a story such as The Lorax by Dr. Seuss, students can examine the importance of conserving natural resources.
Students are often surprised to learn how many different products we get from trees. Use this activity to help students learn just how much we depend on trees in our daily lives.
Students conduct a simulation in which countries use their forest resources to “manufacture” products and to sell them to an international trader. Through the simulation, students explore some of the tradeoffs of resource use.
Students use a carbon footprint calculator to analyze their personal effect on carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere, calculate the amount of carbon stored in a single tree, and explore how carbon sequestration can affect CO2 levels.
