PLT’s flagship, award-winning curriculum, Explore Your Environment: K-8 Activity Guide, now available in Spanish!
PLT’s new Explora tu Ambiente: Guía de Actividades K-8 includes 50 hands-on, multidisciplinary activities to connect multilingual learners to nature and increase young people’s awareness and knowledge about their environment. Activities include detailed step-by-step instructions, academic correlations, time and material requirements, and corresponding student worksheets with green career connections. This supplementary curriculum is designed to develop students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
Using Nature to Teach Math, Science, Language Arts & More
Explora tu Ambiente: Guía de Actividades K-8 offers educators a wide variety of engaging, hands-on lessons, organized into grade bands: K-2, 3-5, and 6-8. Many activities also suggest variations for doing the activity with a different grade level or audience.
Topics include trees and forests, wildlife, water, air, energy, waste, climate change, invasive species, community planning, and more. The activities encompass the economic, ecological, and social aspects of environmental issues and are designed to help students learn how to think, not what to think.
“Forests are the heart of our planet and the source of our collective health. We firmly believe that educating our communities about the worth of forests is an investment in our future. Education is the bridge between indifference and action, between destruction and conservation.” -Felipe Benítez, Executive Director and Founder of Corazon Latino.
The activities are suitable for use in formal classrooms and nonformal settings and several are particularly suited to exploring urban environments. Most activities are designed to take one or two 50-minute periods of instruction.
Designed to be easy to use, each activity contains all the information needed to teach the core lesson, including background information, preparation instructions, materials and time requirements, step-by-step instructions, student pages, assessment suggestions, and suggestions for extending the lesson.
Taking students outdoors to make observations or collect data is the core of many lessons and while there are lessons for both indoors and outdoors, all activities offer ways to “¡Llévalo Afuera!” to extend student learning. In addition, many suggest service-learning opportunities that take students into their community.
Get it now! Purchase an e-book available from Shop.PLT.org, or get it through your PLT State Coordinator along with high-quality professional development and additional resources tailored to your state’s standards and environment. Through these interactive (and fun) in-person or virtual workshops, participants practice how to use PLT materials while also gaining insights from the facilitator and each other related to content and teaching strategies.
Hands-on Learning
PLT activities are hands-on and investigation-based, making learning fun while also building skills, stimulating knowledge gains, and actively engaging students. They afford learners the opportunity to learn through real experiences, rather than just reading or hearing about them.
Children discover why leaves turn yellow in the fall. They learn how seeds travel through the wind and grow in the soil where they land. They look underneath leaves, stones, and rotting logs for evidence of decomposers. They create nature journals, develop their creative writing skills, craft stories from their observations. They “adopt” a tree and learn about that species and watch how it changes through the seasons.
They pretend to be trees and gather the nutrients they need for them to survive, collecting different colored squares for each element. They learn to “read” a cross section of a tree to see how old it is through the number of rings and what happened in each year. They learn to focus and observe using their five senses. They map out sounds they hear, they collect data and build bar graphs, comparing different elements in nature they find.
They learn in a different way.
Review brief summaries of the 50 activities contained in PLT’s Explora tu Ambiente: Guía de Actividades K-8.
Well-tested Teaching Strategies
All PLT activities have been thoroughly field-tested by educators working with students in the classroom and in nonformal settings. In addition to inquiry-based instruction and outdoor teaching and learning, PLT activities employ differentiated instruction strategies, career connections, STEM skills building, and authentic assessment.
For example, each activity suggests effective strategies for students to apply and demonstrate what they learned from the activity. A Career Corner (“Profesiones”) is included with every student worksheet to introduce learners to related green careers. Every activity incorporates at least some elements of STEM and lists relevant STEM skills. Some activities are denoted as STEM exemplars.
Activities can be used as individual, stand-alone lessons, or several activities can be linked together into a unit of instruction using a storyline technique. Storylines suggested in the guide support learning progressions that hold areas of knowledge and skills together.
PLT is dedicated to ensuring that our education materials contribute to authentic and meaningful learning spaces that represent diverse voices. This newest curriculum has also been developed through a critical lens of justice and inclusion. PLT’s model of professional development also helps to ensure that instruction and content strategies can be modified to meet the needs of all learners.
Learn more about how this guide was developed and some of its key features.
PLT Meets Academic Standards
Explora tu Ambiente: Guía de Actividades K-8 is supplementary curriculum that is multi-disciplinary, using nature as a way to teach science, reading, writing, mathematics, and social studies.
Each PLT activity displays explicit connections to practices and concepts expected by the following national academic standards so teachers can easily see where the materials will fit into their lesson plans:
- Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
- Common Core State Standards—English Language Arts (CCSS.ELA)
- Common Core State Standards—Mathematics (CCSS.MATH)
- College, Career, and Civic Life Framework for Social Studies (C3)
Our professional development further demonstrates these connections, as well as to state and local standards.
For example, see our Common Core Toolkit and NGSS Correlations Toolkit for this guide, also available at plt.org/myk8guide.
High-Quality Professional Development
The Explore Your Environment Online Professional Development Course is a supplement to the Explora tu Ambiente: Guía de Actividades K-8 and supports formal and nonformal educators, as well as natural resource professionals, in effectively leading activities with youth. Please note that the course is only available in English.
“PLT Professional Development prepares educators to use the activities right away. And that itself help the educators realize how easy it is to get the kids outside and teaching about environmental education.” – Rafael Salgado, Executive Director, Cal-Wood Education Center & Translator of Explora tu Ambiente: Guía de Actividades K-8
Through the course’s guidance, activity simulations, video demonstrations, reflection questions, and action planning, you will be able to:
- Lead activities outdoors and meet your teaching objectives by using the guide’s activities and recommended strategies.
- Modify and scaffold PLT activities as needed to honor youths’ contexts, backgrounds, and strengths and shape activities based on their culture, race, and ethnicity.
- Build units of instruction using PLT activities to support the achievement of instructional goals (e.g., academic standards, teaching outdoors, STEM).
- Use curated resources to support and supplement instruction.
Prefer to attend an in-person or live virtual workshop? Connect to a professional network through your PLT State Coordinator at plt.org/yourstate.
Get PLT’s Explora tu Ambiente: Guía de Actividades K-8!
Purchase a copy of this 432-page guide from Shop.PLT.org, available as an e-book.
Contact your PLT State Coordinator to find about a scheduled workshop in your area, including remote professional development opportunities, or work with him or her to plan one for your unique setting!
Additional Resources
Cross-reference indices for activities include subject; grade level; topic; STEM skills; and differentiated instruction.
Also included are a variety of appendices, for example:
- Enseñaza Según los Estándares / Teaching to Standards
- Consejos para Enseñar al Aire Libre / Tips for Teaching Outdoors
- Unidades de Instrucción / Units of Instruction
- Haciendo un Argumento Científico / Making a Scientific Argument
- Planificación de una Investigación / Planning an Investigation
- Rúbrica de Evaluación / Assessment Rubric
Download resources for this guide at plt.org/myk8guide, including the worksheets (or student pages) for each activity.
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Please remember that all PLT curriculum materials are protected under copyright law. Reproduce responsibly.
