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.
Nature of Fire features three PLT activities for educators of students in grades 6-8 about sustainable forest management and strategies to reduce catastrophic wildfire, ensure resilient forests, maintain forests, and restore degraded lands.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The trees in our communities provide many benefits: they improve air quality, store carbon, and conserve energy.
Acting as foresters, learners grapple with decisions about how to manage a forest sustainably while serving different needs.