Celebrating Earth Day
Saturday, April 22, is Earth Day 2017. This year’s Earth Day campaign focuses on Environmental & Climate Literacy, which the organization aims to achieve through education. Their website states: “We need to build a global citizenry, which is fluent in the concepts of climate change, and aware of its unprecedented threat to our planet. We need to empower everyone with knowledge to act in defense of environmental protection.”
Join the effort at your school, with classroom discussions and hands-on activities. Surveys conducted with teens during our Chase the Race 2016 campaign indicate that today’s youth has a strong interest in the environment. Earth Day activities at school can help fulfill your students’ desire to make a difference for our planet, and may inspire a few prospective STEM scholars as well!
Earth Day Resources for Educators
The Toolkits page on the Earth Day site provides a rich assortment of tools for teaching climate literacy. The Action Toolkit download includes educational material, key messages to impart, and steps to creating an Earth Day event.
In addition, the web page includes a link to the Primary and Secondary Education web-based toolkit, a “cross-disciplinary resource that includes a range of curricula, lesson plans, educational activities, films, and much more, that will engage students to be fluent in local environmental issues, and tackle the unprecedented challenge of climate change.” This kit includes a week of lesson plans, categorized by grade: K-4, 5-8 and high school. Examples include:
- Become a Junior Forest Ranger – uses Forest Service science practices to engage students 7-13 in nature. Includes a 16-page adventure guide workbook.
- Use a Compass – hands-on activity for grades 5-8
- Map Greenhouse Emissions – a downloadable lesson plan for middle school, from the EPA. Includes complete teaching instructions, vocabulary, homework assignments and in-class activities.
- Creating Recycled Paper – a hands-on activity for middle school
- Exploring Green Jobs – a lesson plan for high school students, including classroom activity and a link to online career tools
Take Action; Get Hands-On
Other resources on the Earth Day website enable both students and educators to become actively involved in conservation, and join the Billion Acts of Green campaign, which aims to facilitate and inspire 3 billion individuals “acts of green” around the planet by the year 2020, when the Earth Day organization reaches age 50.
Other hands-on activities include: