New Explore Your Environment: K-8 Activity Guide
With 50 hands-on, multidisciplinary activities, our new guide has everything you need to get children outdoors to learn about the natural world.
50 Activities and Lesson Plans
Are you looking for more ways to help students explore nature? Check out PLT's new Explore Your Environment: K-8 Activity Guide!
This supplementary curriculum is designed to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills. The activities present students with real-world opportunities to understand how their actions affect the world around them and apply STEM skills.
Use the activities to connect students to the outdoors, no matter if you live in a rural or urban area.
Hands-On Activities
Get students excited about nature with multidisciplinary, hands-on activities
Connections to Standards
Connections to Next Generation Science Standards, Common Core, and C3 Framework for Social Studies
Flexible Lesson Plans
The activities include ways to adapt them for different learning styles and abilities
PLT's New K-8 Activity Guide Includes:
- 50 multidisciplinary activities
- Background information, worksheets, and assessments
- Ways to connect students to nature and the outdoors in both rural and urban areas
- Ideas for enhancing and extending the activities
- Activities to enhance lesson plans about ecosystems, patterns, biodiversity, and more
What teachers are saying about PLT's new activity guide
"The guide is attractive, easy to follow, and perfectly outlines everything needed for a flawless environmental education experience."
- Mandy Kern (Kansas)
"The strategies for differentiation and enrichment help to meet the diverse needs of my students and make the experience relevant."
- Robin C. McLean, Ed.D. (New Jersey)
"These activities provoke students' curiosities and inspire wonder. They are engaging and easy to implement."
- Megan Lee (Colorado)
Students in Grades K-2 Will...
- Describe changes they observe in the environment around them
- Model the life stages of a tree
- Identify signs of animal life outdoors
- Set up an experiment to determine what plants need to grow
- Classify products that come from trees
- Make their own paper
- And more!
Students in Grades 3-5 Will...
- Learn about the value of biodiversity
- Model how trees compete to meet their essential needs
- Conduct an investigation to discover why leaves change color in the fall
- Examine the pros and cons of product packaging
- Design a plan for saving water
- Explore jobs related to forest resources
- And more!
Students in Grades 6-8 Will...
- Generate a plan for managing a forested area
- Give a persuasive presentation on protecting an endangered species
- Conduct a community survey to learn how people in their neighborhood perceive and benefit from trees
- Propose actions to address local environmental justice issues
- Depict a product's life cycle and all the resources used to make it
- Analyze trends in CO2 levels
- And more!
Get instant access to the new K-8 activity guide
About Project Learning Tree
Project Learning Tree advances environmental literacy, stewardship, and career pathways using trees and forests as windows on the world.
We offer fun, hands-on interdisciplinary activities, suitable for all ages and settings, and high-quality professional development for educators.
Over the last 45 years, PLT has trained 800,000 educators to help students learn how to think, not what to think, about environmental topics.
PLT is an initiative of the Sustainable Forestry Initiative.