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.
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 observe differences over time to learn that change in the environment can occur quickly, slowly, or not at all.
In early spring, many trees sprout bright green leaves. Where do the leaves come from? How do they form? Students investigate these questions by observing tree buds throughout the year.
Students discover that trees have life stages that are similar to those of other living things. They discuss a tree’s role in the ecosystem at each stage of its life.
Using paper as an example, students analyze the life cycle and consumption patterns of forest products, and identify the international dimensions of product use. They then draw conclusions about consuming forest products in a more intelligent way.
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.
Find out what’s inside different buds in early spring, where leaves come from, and how they form.