Teaching About the Environment
Here are some links for bringing green living into your classroom.
Five Top Ways to Increase Environmental Awareness in Your Classroom
- Practice what you preach. Reduce, re-use, recycle, and do it where the kids can see you do it: the classroom, the lunchroom, the playground.
- Include earth science in all your lessons. Once you start looking for connections, you'll be amazed how easily you can bring environmental stewardship into your lessons.
- Do the math. Statistics about green topics abound on the internet and in the news. When you're studying math, you might as well use examples from this topic instead of the number of apples Suzy and Johnny have.
- Learn from history. When you're studying about the Great Depression, learn about desertification. When you study great American heroes, remember John Muir and Johnny Appleseed.We didn't just start thinking about this topic.
- Open a book. Literature gives lots of opportunities. Compare Paul Bunyan's attitude with our modern thoughts on forestry. Here again, once you develop that awareness, you'll find it easy to bring it out in your lesson plans.
Environmental Lesson Plans
- Taming the Paper Tiger: a Unit on Paper and the Environment
- A lesson plan combining environmental education, math, science, literacy, and technology. Cute coloring page, reproducible folktale, and multi-grade hands-on activities.
- EE Link Lesson Plans for K-5
- A collection of links to environmental lesson plans.
- Global Warming Lesson Plans
- Video-based lesson plans on global warming from PBS.
- Care2's Collection of Environmental Lesson Plans
- A variety of lesson plans on a range of environmental topics.
- Green Classroom Project
- Science investigations for the classroom.
- Animal Adaptations
- Explore animals' adaptations to their environments.
- Lesson Corner's Collection
- An array of environment-focused lesson plans.
- GM's Environment Lesson Plans
- Car-oriented, but interesting anyway. Learn about fuel cells, transportation through time, and possibilities for non-polluting cars of the future.
- Lifestyles of the Eco-Friendly
- A whimsically dramatic way to look at everyday lifestyle choices that affect the environment.
Books on Environmental Education
Environmental Education Teacher Resource Handbook (Teacher Resource Handbook series)
Amazon Price: $40.95 (as of 11/29/2009) 
A Handbook of Environmental Education
Amazon Price: $57.95 (as of 11/29/2009)
POSTER SET ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES GR. 4-9
Amazon Price: (as of 11/29/2009)
Kids' Books for Environmental Education
Everything Kids' Environment Book: Learn how you can help the environment-by getting involved at school, at home, or at play (Everything Kids Series)
Amazon Price: $7.95 (as of 11/29/2009)
A Hot Planet Needs Cool Kids: Understanding Climate Change and What You Can Do About It
Amazon Price: $10.87 (as of 11/29/2009)
A Kid's Eye View of the Environment
Amazon Price: $8.99 (as of 11/29/2009)
Earth Book for Kids: Activities to Help Heal the Environment
Amazon Price: $10.19 (as of 11/29/2009)
New Featured Lenses
-
Nature Journaling
-
Creating a Nature Journal is an exciting way to record the changes in the world around you. It's inexpensive and can be both educational and recreational for children and adults.
-
Sustainable Gardening a la Rabbit Hill
-
When Robert Lawson wrote and illustrated Rabbit Hill over 60 years ago he was ahead of his time in the way he felt about sharing his part of this earth with the indigenous animals. For years, we have been using many of the gardening "techniques" that...
-
Global Warming for children
-
For young children to understand a concept like Global Warming it needs to be taught through hands-on observable experiments. Make a terrarium with falling rain. Melt ice and watch the water level of a lake rise. Observe what happens when plants rec...
-
Save the Planet: Ecological Footprint Education
-
We all leave footprints in the sand, the question is, will we be a big heal, or a great soul. First off, you may be asking, “What is an ecological footprint?” According to Wikipedia’s definition, “an ecological footprint is a...
-
Recycling for Kids and Educational Fun
-
With the environment increasingly being polluted and tons of garbage congesting our land fills, what does the future hold for our kids? How safe is our environment? Kids in the United States and around the world need Education in Recycling, energy c...
Explore related pages
Global Warming for children- For young children to understand a concept like Global Warming it needs to be ta...
Yes, I Love My Hybrid Car- Yep, I am a rabid Prius owner. I got it for the environment. I love it for the m...
Birdwatching in China with Grandma- China is fast becoming a premier birding location in the world. 1,198...
10 Simple ways to reduce gas consumption- If you are interested in saving our environment, help reduce pollution, reduce C...
What You Can Do - Global Warming- Ever notice the climate jumps in the past 5 years? Ever wonder why there a...
