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.
Designed for 6th-8th grade teachers, the fully online Carbon & Climate E-Unit provides activities and resources to introduce students to some of the complex issues involved in climate change.
For grades 3-5. Students focus on forests (one of the largest and most complex types of ecosystems) and come to understand some of the interactions present in all ecosystems.
Students explore the environmental, social, and economic criteria of forest certification and consider possible benefits and limitations of certification for both forests and people.
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.
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.
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.
By reading a story such as The Lorax by Dr. Seuss, students can examine the importance of conserving natural resources.
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.