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.
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.
Students play the role of forest manager for a 400-acre (162-hectare) public forest, exploring the complex factors that influence management decisions about forest lands.
All kinds of people work in the forest—from foresters, to loggers, to scientists. Everyone depends on properly managed forests for recreation, essential products, wildlife and biodiversity, clean water and air.
Regular time outdoors is beneficial for emotional, mental, and physical health, as well as for creativity, learning, and child development. In this activity, students will examine the physical and emotional effects of a task done outdoors.
The trees in our communities provide many benefits: they improve air quality, store carbon, and conserve energy.
Decisions about community land use are complex and often involve many people in many ways. In this activity, students use trees as a backdrop to develop a land-use plan.
Acting as foresters, learners grapple with decisions about how to manage a forest sustainably while serving different needs.
