Inspire students to celebrate the gift of our planet’s beauty and natural resources. Explore these ready-to-use activities, interactive games, videos, and more that help students learn the science of and importance of our environment for Earth Day.
Use these choice boards to explore Earth Day topics and allow students to demonstrate their understanding through the recommended activities.
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Explore Home: An Impossible Field Trip! This 3D, interactive, gamified experience follows the journey from the moon back home in the near future. Along the way, students will complete challenges and encounter sounds, images,and videos that highlight what is it to be a steward of our home.
Climate and the Environment
Use these fun activities to highlight the importance of Earth Day including discussion questions, a coloring sheet, vocabulary cards, and more for titles like The Boy Who Grew a Forest and Earth Yay!
Plant Trees
In this mental exercise, students will visualize planting a seed in the earth. Even when a task seems big and difficult, it can be helpful to remember that each tree was once a tiny seed.
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End Plastics
Discover why you can’t have plastic straws on the Space Station with Luna, Clyde, and Jupiter! The group starts wondering: what’s wrong with plastic straws? They set off on a fantastic adventure where they end up discovering the flaw with straws.
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Sustainable Fashion
Explore the viability of everyday materials by creating a makeshift fabric from recycled plastic that can be used in artwork, fashion, and accessories.
Global Clean Up
Inspire children to explore their connections to nature and how their positive actions can care for it. Join Abby, Zoe, and Rudy as they sing along with their animal friends about taking care of our Earth together.
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Mystery Science Lesson
Students will explore the wide variety of life found in the bug world and learn to appreciate the unique traits and abilities of bugs.
Join the team as Marina’s new friend, Samira, comes to visit Smiling Trees Park all the way from Saudi Arabia. They’ll soon discover how important water is back in Samira’s country and the importance of water conservation in the park.
In this episode, students explore how living things are connected. Elena and her friends feed tree leaves to the pigs and plant some new seeds with their classmates.
Uncover why protecting natural resources, like oysters, is important for the environment and ecosystems.
Students learn about what happens in unbalanced ecosystems and how that can lead to an overabundance of algae and harmful algal blooms.
Explore why plastic is a problem: though it is cheap and easy to manufacture, it doesn’t go away when we’re done with it and ends up polluting the environment.
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The fashion industry has a major impact on the environment and there can be a lot of waste associated with cheaper clothing typically bought at malls.
Meet Gamo elders and individuals who highlight the beauty and practicality of preserving traditional cultural knowledge and lifestyles.
Have you ever imagined what life would be like without trees? Besides not having forests, you would have to give up chewing gum, toothpaste, and ice cream, too. In this episode, explore how natural resources like trees effect our lives.
Explore the difference between renewable and nonrenewable resources and why it is important that we treat all our natural resources with care.
Students watch a video and answer questions about the challenges that farmers face when adapting their practice to a desert environment.
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Ready-to-Use Quiz
Learn about the Smartfin Project, a citizens’ science project to help measure ocean temperatures. Several surfers use surfboards with an electronic fin and researchers are able to use the data to brainstorm ways to combat climate change and ocean warming.
Explore a recently published study of 78 countries found about half of the trees were experiencing climate conditions beyond their limits.
Explore the diversity of plastic composition and the idea of chemical recycling, which takes plastics molecules apart and aids the sorting process.
Read a study that found dryer lint can release microfibers into the air, which spread. Various materials clump and break apart differently, and some clothes release more microfibers than others.
Learn about a new technology that could reduce the number of harmful PFA compounds, PFOs and PFOAs. The Airforce Civil Engineer Center has developed Enhanced Contact Plasma Reactor, which uses argon gas to reduce the concentration of PFAs in contaminated water.
Students watch a video and discuss the differences between renewable and non-renewable energy resources.
Learn about fascinating STEM careers through a variety of resources including career profiles, student activations, challenges, classroom activities, virtual field trips, and more.
Find resources to inspire students to learn, explore, innovate and lead us to a healthier world. Check out the interactive classroom tools that connect important real-world sustainability goals to everyday challenges for students.
This innovative, engaging, standards-aligned program encourages middle school students to explore the relationship between water and energy through the lens of conservation.
Explore data like never before! Using real-world data sets, standards aligned activities and interactive tools, Discover Data connects students to using data as a powerful problem-solving tool.
Empowers students to develop their natural creativity and curiosity into lifelong skills which they can use to solve challenges and connect with others.