Winter-Themed STEM Activities
The cold winter season provides many opportunities to add fun and interesting STEM activities to your lesson plans. Here are some ideas to get you started.
Elementary (3-5)
STEM: Visit a Place Where
What measurable effect does a visit to a favorite park or green space have on you? These STEM enrichment ideas for one of PLT’s popular activities will take your students outdoors to learn more about a local park or open space near them, and how they might conduct a scientific research experiment to determine the ways in which being outside can improve a person’s mood, health, and wellness.
Theme-based Activity Collections
PLT’s hands-on activity collections offers fun and multi-disciplinary activities that connect youth in grades K-2, 3-5, and 6-8 to nature and the outdoors.
What Happens to Trees that Fall in the Forest
In dying, a tree plays an essential role in sustaining life around it. Here are some classroom activities to explore decomposition and how a fallen tree provides for other life in the forest.
New PLT Activity Collections: Biodiversity Blitz for Grade 3-5
Biodiversity Blitz is the third in a new series of theme-based PLT activity collections. It features three PLT activities for educators of students in grades 3-5 that invite learners to investigate the variety of species in an ecosystem, and how this variety – or biodiversity – helps sustain life on Earth.
Virtual Makeover: The Closer You Look
Colorado PLT Coordinator Danielle Ardrey shares how to adapt the PLT Activity “The Closer You Look” for remote instruction. Students will go outdoors or view pictures to take a closer look at trees and their parts.
Virtual Makeover: Sounds Around
Learn how to adapt our “Sounds Around” student activity for remote instruction, allowing students to tune in to the everyday sounds of nature from home or a nearby outdoor space.
Spider-Inspired Classroom Activities for Halloween
Are you ready to add some spooky science to your fall lesson plans? We have gathered a whole cauldron of creepy, crawly spider science activities to enhance your lessons. Try these 11 Halloween activities inspired by our eight-legged friends. Examine spider webs outdoors, build a spider habitat, consider how a spider would adapt to life in space, and more!
Virtual Makeover: Looking at Leaves
Many PLT activities are easily adapted to virtual learning, as we illustrate in this new monthly feature in the Branch. Check out this adaptation for Looking at Leaves from Colorado’s PLT Coordinator
Growing Plants in Small Spaces With Students of All Ages
You don’t need a schoolyard or backyard garden to observe plants grow—you can do it inside your classroom or kitchen. Growing plants indoors, even in small spaces, is much easier than you may think.