Celebrate Earth Day
Lessons, articles, and fun activities for students help promote environmental awareness for Earth Day and throughout the year. Find 25 more great ideas and printables to celebrate Earth Day.
Make a difference in your community -- enter the Community Planting Day Teacher Sweepstakes. Community Planting Day is a great learning opportunity for students to raise awareness that trees and plants are an important part of the ecosystem while giving back to their schools and local communities.
Also, visit our kids' activism site based on the book The Down-to-Earth-Guide to Global Warming .
Book Lists
Earth Day BooksFind out what problems plague our planet and get inspired to find solutions.
Scholastic Kids Press Corps
Earth Day is a global holiday that celebrates our planet's environment. Read through this special collection of Scholastic Kids Press Corps coverage of Earth Day to learn more about this global holiday.
Interactive Whiteboard Lessons
Standards-based Earth Day lesson activities for use with the SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard and Notebook collaborative learning software.
Articles
Don't miss these exciting stories and fascinating information about our planet and the people who care about it.
Instructor Magazine | Teacher recommendations for ways to celebrate Earth Day in the classroom.
Quick Earth Day Ideas: Grade 6-8
Instructor Magazine |
Save your sneakers, eat an Earth-friendly lunch, and more great ideas.
Our "Go Green" winners this month showed that many teachers are thinking seriously about the environment and are aware of the consequences of not going green.
Cooperative board game to encourage creative recycling. Provides instructions for the teacher/players and two reproducible pages of game pieces.
April Primary Poetry Library
Poetry selections and related activities that correlate with Earth Day topics.
Activities
Discover ways to learn about issues affecting our planet.
Make your voice heard by voting in the Kids' Environmental Report Card.
Find out how to help preserve the planet by solving these environmentally-themed math questions on ratios, percentages, and basic operations.
From South Korea to Costa Rica, celebrate Earth Day all around the world in this environmental read-aloud that features words like parade, trees, drums, and recycling.
From South Korea to Costa Rica, celebrate Earth Day all around the world in this environmental read-aloud that features words like earth, saplings, breathe, and drawings.
Use this guide to great Web sources to discover the amazingly rich wildlife and mysterious climate of one of the most valuable ecosystems.
Lesson Plans
Earth Day, Every Day
by Jennifer Atkinson
Introduce the origins of Earth Day, recycling and read a story that shows what happens to all of the garbage we throw away. Several different activities are presented for you to choose that best suit the needs of your students.
Students comprehend a brief history of paper, learn the definition of recycling, and discover why we recycle.
Learn about ecosystems, understand how reducing, reusing, and recycling can impact the environment, and practice reading comprehension skills.
Students review water sources and the water cycle. Students understand that water should be cleaned before we drink it. Students learn that people around the world do not have clean drinking water.
Encourage students to work in groups to research the variety of energy sources used in the United States and creatively present their findings to the class.
Students will learn about local environmental changes by researching how the ecosystem in their town or city has changed.
Students will learn firsthand how Earthwatch teams study animals in their environment and work to preserve these endangered ecosystems.
Build graphing skills with lessons and activities involving real-world data about the environment and recycling.
Look Up! Look Down!
by Steven Hicks
Illustrates a unit plan for teaching students about geology, landforms, the atmosphere and ecological environments. Students examine soil, create a prism, make their own landforms, and more.
