Suggested activities for students

1. Join with others in:
  • Beautifying school grounds and parks, using local plant species.
  • Reclaiming abandoned lots into community gardens; adopting a local park.
  • Educating one another about local species of animals and plants.
  • Forming wildlife and gardening organizations, or joining existing ones.
  • Planting trees in supervised tree planting programs
  • Creating a species enhancement project like obtaining fish eggs from local hatcheries and raising them till its time to release them to the wild.
  • Recycling cans, bottles and paper.
  • Composting vegetable and garden wastes.

2. Record your actions over a week to determine your environmental consciousness. Note your efforts to pick up litter, recycle, reduce consumption, save energy, use alternative transportation sources. Share your efforts with others in the class. Create a class competition for the most unusual, most extensive, most creative efforts.

3. Visit a local zoo or botanical park or invite to class staff from these areas to discuss their efforts at preserving biodiversity.

4. Identify the terms renewable, nonrenewable, perpetual, reusable and recyclable resources and explain the differences among them. Play a game in which the class is divided into teams of four.

  • Give each team 16 pieces of popcorn, candies or nuts which represent the teams' supply of a renewable resource that is replenished after each round of play. Each student can take freely from the team supply but the following rules apply: (1) At the end of the game, each team member will get to eat all the popcorn amassed (2) Each one needs to take at least one piece per round to be sustained (3) At the end of each round, the resource will be replenished by one-half of its existing amount.
  • Allow students to take freely from their team's pile, but have them record individual and group pieces.
  • Replenish by one half the number of pieces taken from the team pile.
  • Play three or four more rounds, stopping after each to find out if any of the students didn't survive. Then provide each group with the prescribed amount of new popcorn.
  • After four or five rounds, have students share what happened. In which teams did all the students survive? Which students had the most popcorn in their personal supplies? Which team had the most popcorn in its collective pile? Which teams think they would be able to keep eating popcorn forever as long as the resource kept renewing itself? On these teams, how many pieces were these students taking each round?
  • Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using a resource in a sustainable and a non-sustainable way. What would happen if the population of the group increased as the game went on?

5. Visit a vacant lot, garden or natural site near or in your school yard to closely examine a real ecosystem in action and record the rang of life forms you can find: plants, the range of small and large animals, and evidence of human life. What elements help support animals living there? Plants living there? What would happen if one of these were missing? Create a map of you findings. Prepare presentations on the value of an area in providing plant and animal habitat.

6. Web of Life Activity.
  • Create a list of categories so that everything living, non-living and human-specific would fit into at least one category. (Examples might be plants, animals, minerals, technology, culture, religion, art, emotions etc.) Post the list for everyone to see.
  • Start the game by giving a ball of yarn to a student, asking him or her to name something from one category (like flowers from the "Plant" category). Holding onto one end, the student should roll or toss the yarn to another student, who must name something from a different category and explain the relationship to the first item named, such as "painting" from art column; then hold the string and pass the ball to the third student who does the same as the second and passes it on to the fourth student. The game continues until all students are connected.
  • At that point discuss how human actions that directly affect part of the Earth System indirectly affect many other parts. Use water pollution as an example and ask which student named something that would be negatively affected. Choose one (e.g. the one that said drinking supply) and have him or her show stress by tugging the string back and forth. Discuss the effect of this vibration on others.
  • As you rewind the yarn, ask each person letting go to name something a person could do to make the Earth a healthier place. Collect these ideas, post and implement them.