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.
Students graph changes in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) over the course of several decades and identify possible reasons for those changes. They also explore the relationship among CO2, the Earth’s climate, and wildland fires.
Students model what happens to renewable and nonrenewable resources over time and discover why sustainable use of natural resources is so important.
By examining trash, students can learn a lot about how and why they throw things away. Students find ways to reduce their community’s waste production and improve its management through participation in a service-learning project.
Succession is a natural pattern of change that takes place over time in a forest or other ecosystem. Students read a story about succession and investigate the connections among plants, animals, and successional stages in a local ecosystem.
Students learn about the three elements a fire needs to burn and find out how this “fire triangle” can be used to prevent and manage wildland fires, particularly in the wildland–urban interface.
Students gain an appreciation for how many natural resources they depend on in their day-to-day lives. By tracing the resources that go into making one item, students learn how its manufacturing can have an impact on the environment.
The water cycle is the system by which Earth’s water is collected, purified, and distributed from the environment to living things and then returned to the environment.
Students explore differences in soil types and what those differences mean to people and to plants. They also investigate the role soil organisms play, both in building soil and in decomposition.
Students will look for signs of autumn and conduct an investigation to discover why the leaves of deciduous trees change color in the fall.