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 conduct a field study of three different environments as they focus on sunlight, soil moisture, temperature, wind, water flow, plants, and animals in each 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 analyze factors that can change forests by using data sets, maps and other information. They also examine projections about future climate conditions and explore how these factors may change forests in the 21st century.
Students learn about succession by studying the reestablishment of ecological communities following the 1980 volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens and by setting up experimental plots to observe successional changes over time.
Compare different environments to understand how nonliving elements can influence living elements within an ecosystem.
