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 explore the environmental, social, and economic criteria of forest certification and consider possible benefits and limitations of certification for both forests and people.
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.
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.
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.
Nearly everything we buy comes in some sort of package. Students examine the pros and cons of different packaging and design an “ideal” package.
It’s amazing how many things live in and on rotting logs. In this activity, your students will become familiar with some of those organisms by observing fallen logs or other decomposing pieces of wood.
It’s easy to waste water and even easier to take water for granted. Water pours out of our faucets as though it were endlessly available. But the truth is the supply of good quality, fresh water is limited. Fortunately, we can all conserve water.
Students learn about the papermaking process by trying it themselves. Students will find out that they can make their own paper and that their product is practical, as well as beautiful.