Resources: Core Practice 2
Stewardship and Service-LearningToolbox Resources
The Bee Cause Project provides youth with opportunities to understand, engage, and learn from honeybees to connect with the natural environment while developing STEAM skills. In addition to their grant program, the Bee Cause Project provides downloadable curriculum guides, lesson plans, and beekeeping information, as well as videos and webinars, that can be accessed on their website.
Boulder Valley School District Garden as a Classroom Manual
This guide, created by Boulder Valley (Colorado) School District’s School Food Project, explores the benefits of gardens, explains how to build a garden team, outlines sustainability best practices, and offers a variety of lesson plans.
Carrot City: Creating Places for Urban Agriculture
From Amazon.com: Carrot City is a collection of ideas, both conceptual and realized, that use design to enable sustainable food production, helping to reintroduce urban agriculture to our cities. Focusing on the need and desire to grow food within the city to supply food from local sources, the contributions of architecture, landscape design, and urban design are explored.
Forty projects demonstrate how the production of food can lead to visually striking and artistically interesting solutions that create community and provide inhabitants with immediate access to fresh, healthful ingredients. The authors show how city planning and architecture that considers food production as a fundamental requirement of design result in more community gardens, greenhouses tucked under raised highways, edible landscapes in front yards in place of resource-devouring lawns, living walls that bring greenery into dense city blocks, and productive green roofs on schools and large apartment blocks that can be tended and harvested by students and residents alike.
Center for Ecoliteracy’s Designing a Resilient Community
In this three-lesson activity from the Center for Ecoliteracy, students participate in project-based learning over several days as they assess their community’s ability to respond to crises that threaten natural and human systems. Then they develop ideas for how their community could be redesigned to be more resilient. Downloadable materials for these lessons include instructions and discussion questions, a set of “Redesigning Our Community” cards for students, professional development suggestions for instructors, and links to resources about resilient communities.
Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Education Program
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has been providing K-12 students with meaningful watershed experiences for over 40 years. Whether your school is located in the Chesapeake Bay watershed or not, the Foundation has resources and programs to meet your needs. Learn more about the Education Program’s offerings, including professional development for educators; field programs and leadership programs for students; and classroom resources such as videos, lesson plans, research tools, and ideas for student action projects.
Connecting Classrooms to the Community: A Guide for a Community-based Approach to Education
This educator’s guide provides background on community-based education, an overview of the community-based educational process, and lesson plans and resources for educators to use in their classrooms.
Cornell Garden-Based Learning provides educators with inspiring, research-based gardening resources and professional development to support engaging, empowering, and relevant learning experiences for children, youth, adults, and communities. Their site offers tools and resources for starting a gardening program as well as lessons, activities, and curricula to support garden-based learning.
EarthEcho International was founded in 2000 by siblings Philippe and Alexandra Cousteau in honor of their father Philippe Cousteau Sr., son of the legendary explorer Jacques Yves Cousteau. The organization offers a host of tools and resources to equip youth with the skills necessary to identify and solve environmental challenges starting in their own communities. These include service-learning projects through EarthEcho Expeditions; virtual field trips; and lesson plans and curriculum materials to support high-quality classroom experiences.
Fourth-grade educators can download an activity on exploring federal lands and waters with their students, as well as print out paper passes that grant fourth grade students free access to all national parks, lands, and waters for an entire year.
Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont
Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont delivers experiential learning for youth, educators, and adults through programs that promote self-discovery, critical thinking, and effective teaching and leadership. Programs last for three to ten days and include educator workshops, K-12 overnight field studies, and summer youth camps and adventures. Participants typically stay on-site, living and learning in the world’s greatest classroom, Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Green Bronx Machine is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building healthy, equitable, and resilient communities through inspired education, local food systems, and 21st Century workforce development. Their school-based model uses urban agriculture, aligned with key school performance indicators, to grow healthy students and healthy schools. The Green Bronx Machine has developed a classroom curriculum that turns any school or community gardening program into an academic and standards-based learning experience. With technology-enabled lesson plans that use food and plant life cycles to teach multiple subjects, students learn critical thinking and problem-solving as they explore, discover, and create their own ecosystem. Visit their website to learn more about the curriculum and the organization’s many projects.
Green Schoolyards: A Growing Movement Supporting Health, Education, and Connection with Nature
A report from Healthy Schools Campaign and Openlands, Green Schoolyards: A Growing Movement Supporting Health, Education, and Connection with Nature documents the journeys and lessons of green schoolyard programs across the country and is informed by a rich dialogue that has been taking place at the national and local levels about how to help children, families, schools, communities, and our environments thrive. The report shares information and stories, as well as tangible steps communities can take to develop their own green schoolyards.
Green Schoolyards America’s School Ground Activity Guide Set
Green Schoolyards America’s Living Schoolyard Activity Guide – United States Edition and International School Grounds Month Activity Guide contain 235 activities contributed by 187 schools, agencies, nonprofits, museums, universities, businesses, and utilities across the U.S. and 27 countries around the world. Both guides are available for free online and contains a wide range of ideas for use by PreK-12 schools before, during, and after school.
The GREEN (Garden Resources, Education, and Environment Nexus) Tool
This research brief describes the background study that led to the conception of the GREEN Tool and highlights how it can be used to strengthen school gardens. The purpose of the study was to examine which components make up a well-integrated garden in New York City schools and to determine how those components work together. This study resulted in the GREEN Tool, comprised of a Map illustrating how and when to operationalize the 19 components needed to establish, integrate, and sustain a school garden, and a Scorecard with questions on a three-point scale to assess progress on the 19 components. Used together, the Map and Scorecard can help school garden leaders develop and sustain a garden that is well integrated into their school. This brief focuses on the background study and the GREEN Tool Map and includes policy recommendations based on research findings.
Guiding Principles for Exemplary Place-Based Stewardship Education
Developed by the Great Lakes Stewardship Initiative, these guiding principles were developed to describe the organization’s vision for explementary place-based stewardship education in a K-12 context. Educators outside of the Great Lakes region are encouraged to consider how they can adapt these principles to their unique environmental, community, organizational, and programmatic context. A separate user guide addresses in more detail how these principles and an associated rubric can be used within the school setting.
Hands on the Land (HOL) is a network of field classrooms designed to connect students, teachers, and families to their public lands. HOL offers a variety of hands-on education programs in natural and cultural settings that have been developed collaboratively by public land management agencies, education centers, member sites, and schools. In addition to the field activities at each site, teachers and students can learn from each other through the HOL website. This website allows teachers and students to share information and learn about their local ecosystems, creative teaching strategies, and much more. The website also houses a collection of member-contributed educator resources that span all core subjects.
Izaak Walton League’s Creek Freaks Program
The Creek Freaks program is for kids ages 10 – 14 who want to make a splash to help the environment. They become their community’s stream experts – exploring local streams; learning how healthy trees, shrubs, and grasses protect clean water and wildlife; and what the community can do to improve water quality. The program uses a guide called Holding onto the GREEN Zone, developed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which helps youth explore “green zones” (another name for riparian zones). The program is filled with discovery, exploration, and of course, using the Creek Freaks’ website to share photos and data with other Creek Freaks. Educators will find training, curriculum materials, and a number of additional resources to assist with implementation in their classrooms.
Jane Goodall’s Roots and Shoots
Founded in 1991, Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots is a youth service program for young people of all ages. Through this program, youth lead local change through service campaigns while developing skills and traits of compassionate leaders. Students can choose from one of the suggested campaigns on the website or design their own. Educators will find all the tools and resources they need to implement a Roots & Shoots service campaign at their school and can search the website for projects that have been completed by students around the world.
KidsGardening has been a leader in the school gardening movement since 1982. The organization aims to inspire, support, and connect educators with resources that help them get students outdoors learning in school gardens and connecting to nature. Resources found on the website include webinars, lesson plans, gardening activities and guides, and how-to’s for designing and sustaining garden programs.
Learning by Doing: Students Take Greening to the Community
This booklet, produced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Corporation for National and Community Service, was developed to encourage schools to jump-start their own service-learning programs. Profiles in the booklet include projects that focus on various aspects of solid waste management, such as recycling, composting, reducing household hazardous waste, and addressing the life cycle of products we consume every day.
Life Lab is a national leader in the garden-based learning movement, with over 35 years of experience working with young people in gardens. Through workshops and consultations, Life Lab provides educators across the country with the inspiration and information necessary to engage young people in gardens and on farms. Their workshops and award-winning publications are go-to resources for educators and families. Life Lab’s Garden Classroom educational center in Santa Cruz, California and its Blooming Classroom garden in Watsonville, California promote experiential learning for people of all ages through field trips, children’s camps, and teacher workshops. Learn more about Life Lab’s educator resources, including curriculum and activity guides, professional development opportunities, and school garden resources.
Million Pollinator Garden Challenge
The Million Pollinator Garden Challenge (MPGC) is a nationwide call to action to preserve and create gardens and landscapes that help revive the health of bees, butterflies, birds, bats, and other pollinators across America. Schools can get in on the action too! Plant a pollinator garden or landscape and register your habitat so it can be counted. The MPGC website contains a number of resources to help you get started, as well as curricula and lessons for the classroom.
Garden clubs around the country partner with schools to help children plan and maintain school gardens. Various programs include the Pollinators Live program, which engages students and teachers in creating diverse school gardens that incorporate native plants to attract bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and other native pollinators. Learn more about National Garden Clubs’ programming for schools.
National Wildlife Federation’s Schoolyard Habitats
The National Wildlife Federation’s Schoolyard Habitats program was created in 1996 to meet the growing interest and distinct needs of schools and school districts in creating and restoring wildlife habitat on school grounds. The program focuses specifically on assisting school communities in the use of school grounds as learning sites for wildlife conservation and cross-curricular learning. This website contains information about the benefits of schoolyard habitats, how to start one of your own, and how to apply for certification as an official Schoolyard Habitat site.
NEEF’s Get Dirty! Learning Expedition Toolkit
The National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF) developed this guide to assist educators in planning instructive and memorable outings that incorporate best practices of outdoor environmental education. The toolkit proceeds step-by-step from planning, to conducting, to presenting place-based projects. Additional resources and tips are suggested. Supplemental activities that develop goal setting, leadership, and team building skills are also included.
The Our Curriculum Matters website is designed to provide inspiration and practical ideas for K-12 teachers who seek meaningful and authentic ways to embed learning in local places. The site highlights the work of Amy Demarest, a former classroom teacher who now works as a curriculum coach. She facilitates a process with teachers to articulate and design curriculum that means more to their students, themselves, and the communities in which they teach. The website offers a wealth of information and resources on place-based education as well as professional development opportunities and examples of student work.
Outward Bound is the leading provider of experiential and outdoor education programs for youth and adults. Dedicated to changing lives through challenge and discovery, Outward Bound programs place a strong emphasis on developing character and preparing students to thrive in the world. On its website, you can search for the Outward Bound course (over 1,000 courses are offered!) that meets your needs. You can also learn more about the organization’s educational approach and how to prepare for participating in an Outward Bound course.
Place-Based Curriculum Design: Exceeding Standards through Local Investigations
From Amazon.com: Place-based Curriculum Design provides pre-service and practicing teachers both the rationale and tools to create and integrate meaningful, place-based learning experiences for students. Practical, classroom-based curricular examples illustrate how teachers can engage the local and still be accountable to the existing demands of federal, state, and district mandates. Coverage includes connecting the curriculum to students’ outside-of-school lives; using local phenomena or issues to enhance students’ understanding of discipline-based questions; engaging in in-depth explorations of local issues and events to create cross-disciplinary learning experiences, and creating units or sustained learning experiences aimed at engendering social and environmental renewal. An on-line resource provides supplementary materials, including curricular templates, tools for reflective practice, and additional materials for instructors and students.
Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities
From Amazon.com: In Placed-Based Education, David Sobel, the author of the highly influential book Beyond Ecophobia, details and celebrates an approach to teaching that emphasizes connections among school, community, and environment. Through academic research, practical examples, and insightful strategies drawn from classrooms throughout the United States, Sobel outlines the practice and pedagogy of this transformative philosophy of education.
Place-Based Education Evaluation Collaborative (PEEC)
PEEC is a unique partnership of several nonprofit organizations and projects from New England and beyond whose aim is to strengthen and deepen the practice of place-based education through program evaluation. PEEC’s website is a one-stop shop for place-based education tools, resources, research, and reports.
Captain Planet Foundation’s Project Hero is a tool and framework that offers a turn-key, place-based, standards-oriented, and authentic project-based learning experience for students. Educators can choose between different Quests – unique learning and activation journeys – focused on locally relevant environmental issues and ecosystems. Each Quest includes multimedia content, lessons, and activities for exploring and understanding threats to species and ecosystems. Quests culminate in hands-on projects that empower students to make meaningful impacts in their environment, which are supported by small grants to cover material expenses.
The Promise of Place website is a project of the Center for Place-Based Learning and Community Engagement, a unique public-private partnership that works to advance the state-of-the-art in place-based education by facilitating collaborative efforts in research, program design, technical assistance, resource development, and dissemination. The website is a treasure trove of research, curriculum, planning tools, case studies, and news. You can also find a calendar of courses, workshops, and conferences on place-based education and information on joining the Promise of Place Network, a grassroots effort to build support for people, schools, and organizations that use natural and cultural contexts to help people learn how to care for the places where they live.
Quick Start Guide to Implementing Place-Based Education
This guide, developed by Getting Smart in partnership with eduInnovation and Teton Science Schools, translates educator insights into an actionable guide for implementing place-based education in classrooms and communities. Actionable examples and tips are shared throughout to inform and inspire place-based opportunities across the curriculum.
Quick Start Guide to Place-Based Professional Learning
This guide, developed by Getting Smart in partnership with eduInnovation and Teton Science Schools, makes the case for place-based professional learning that can benefit teachers in the same way that it benefits students. As educators consider how the community can be a classroom for students, it’s important for them to develop their own sense of place, student ownership, and a long-term strategy to ensure effective implementation. The process can be transformative not only for students, but for those educators who are participating in the journey.
The Rooftop Growing Guide: How to Transform Your Roof into a Vegetable Garden or Farm
From Amazon.com: If you’d like to grow your own food but don’t think you have the space, look up! In urban and suburban areas across the country, farms and gardens are growing atop the rooftops of residential and commercial buildings.
In this accessible guide, author Annie Novak’s passion shines as she draws on her experience as a pioneering sky-high farmer to teach best practices for raising vegetables, herbs, flowers, and trees. The book also includes interviews, expert essays, and farm and garden profiles from across the country, so you’ll find advice that works no matter where you live. Featuring the brass tacks on green roofs, container gardening, hydroponics, greenhouse growing, crop planning, pest management, harvesting tips, and more, The Rooftop Growing Guide will have you reimagining the possibilities of your own skyline.
Schoolyard-Enhanced Learning: Using the Outdoors as an Instructional Tool, K – 8
From Amazon.com: Schoolyard-Enhanced Learning shows how the school grounds—regardless of whether your school is in an urban, suburban, or rural setting—can become an enriching extension of the classroom. In this comprehensive handbook, Herb Broda blends theory and practice, providing readers with practical suggestions and teacher-tested activities for using the most powerful audio-visual tool available—the outdoors.
Emphasizing the practical, this innovative book offers teachers step-by-step guidance to help ensure success when they take a class outside. It provides:
- Background that helps present the case for outdoor learning: educational theory that supports the concept; overview of the terminology; research on the benefits related to student achievement; alignment of outdoor learning with current teaching practices.
- Ideas for making the schoolyard an effective outdoor classroom: the planning process; enhancing and maintaining the site; developing gardens and attracting wildlife; finding community resources and funding.
- Advice on working with a class outdoors: garnering administrative and parental support; considerations before going out; making the most of your outdoor time; using GPS as an educational tool; building on the outdoor experience back in the classroom.
- An array of proven activities that utilize the schoolyard: activities related to specific subject areas; activities that teach process skills; activities that encourage initiative and build community.
At a time when children’s natural curiosity about the outdoors is eclipsed by the demands of busy schedules and the ever-present glow of video screens, schools may be the only place where they are encouraged to interact with nature. Schoolyard-Enhanced Learning can help teachers unlock the powerful learning experiences that exist just beyond the classroom door.
Slow Food USA Youth Farm Stands Toolkit
Slow Food Denver and its partner, Denver Urban Gardens, developed a farm stand model on school grounds using fresh produce from school gardens and local farms. Youth Farm Stands (YFS) provide educational opportunities by reinforcing traditional academics such as math and science and building life skills such as customer service, conflict resolution, and entrepreneurship, and supports nutrition education training and community-building.
This toolkit presents the YFS model and how it can be used in a school setting as an educational tool, a way to teach nutrition and healthy eating, and as a community development and inclusivity-building activity. It provides all the steps and procedures to establish a basic YFS in nearly any school or district, with many resources to expand the program to fit the needs of the community.
State of the River Teacher’s Guide
The State of the River Report — developed in partnership with Friends of the Mississippi River and the National Park Service’s Mississippi National River and Recreation Area — assembles and analyzes a wealth of data and communicates in plain terms how the river is doing to answer these frequently posed questions. The State of the River Report describes 14 indicators that illustrate the condition of the river.
The Teacher’s Guide aims to apply the content of the State of the River Report to grades 3-12 classrooms. Lessons are anchored in Minnesota state standards providing information, resources, and activities that fulfill a benchmark. By design, lessons may stand alone or be embedded in a unit of study. Field trips are not necessary to provide students with engaging, interactive, place-based experiences! The Teacher’s Guide provides lessons that educators can easily implement in their schools and classrooms.
Student Conservation Association
The Student Conservation Association’s (SCA) mission is to build the next generation of conservation leaders and inspire lifelong stewardship of the environment and communities by engaging young people in hands-on service to the land. SCA interns work in parks, public lands, and urban green spaces to make improvements and learn conservation and sustainability practices. Along the way, they learn how to plan, enact, and lead, all while making a tangible impact in conservation. Programs are available for high school and college students. Learn more about SCA’s programs and how to apply on the website.
Teaching in Nature’s Classroom: Core Principles of Garden-Based Education
In Teaching in Nature’s Classroom: Core Principles of Garden-Based Education, Nathan Larson shares a philosophy of teaching in the garden. Rooted in years of experience and supported by research, Larson presents fifteen guiding principles of garden-based education. These principles and best practices are illustrated through engaging stories from the field. The book features vivid paintings by mural artist Becky Redelings and connections to the research literature provided by Alex Wells and Sam Dennis of the University of Wisconsin Environmental Design Lab.
Teaching Our Cities Practice Toolkits
Teaching Our Cities, a project of Common Ground, is creating a collection of toolkits that share best practices that are working at partner schools. Toolkits include videos, blog-style reflections, resources, and practice descriptions. Current toolkits cover teaching a sense of place, learning expeditions, green exhibitions, environmental leadership portfolios, and magnet theme days.
Ten Minute Field Trips: A Teacher’s Guide to Using the Schoolgrounds for Environmental Studies
From Google Books: You don’t have to go far to get science out of the classroom. A National Science Teacher Association best-seller, this book is ideal for teachers in all school environments – urban, suburban, or rural. Renowned educator Helen Ross Russell describes more than 200 short, close-to-home field trips that explore new dimensions of familiar spaces and objects. Brick walls, rock outcrops, lawns, broken pavement, weeds, and trees are all targets for exploration.
Sponsored by Trout Unlimited, Trout in the Classroom (TIC) is a conservation-oriented environmental education program for elementary, middle, and high school students. Throughout the school year, students raise trout from eggs to fry and then release them into approved cold water streams and lakes. This act of raising, monitoring, and caring for young trout fosters a conservation ethic within participating students and promotes an understanding of their shared water resources. Teachers can tailor the program to fit their curricular needs, meaning each TIC program is unique. TIC has interdisciplinary applications in science, social studies, mathematics, language arts, fine arts, and physical education. More information on possible activities and lessons can be found on the TIC website.
USDA Team Nutrition School Garden Resources
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Team Nutrition has assembled a list of resources on school gardens, including general resources on planning, constructing, and maintaining a school garden as well as curricula and training.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Schoolyard Habitat Project Guide
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Schoolyard Habitat Project Guide takes teachers and administrators through the process of creating schoolyard habitat and outdoor classroom projects. The guide covers everything from concept to completion: developing a plan, choosing a site, design and installation, maintenance, and how to incorporate the space into the curriculum. The guide is available in Spanish as well.
What is Place-Based Education and Why Does It Matter?
This guide, developed by Getting Smart in partnership with eduInnovation and Teton Science Schools, offer an overview of place-based education including definitions, benefits, and examples of place-based education in practice submitted by educators from all over the world.
The Wild Center’s Youth Climate Summit Toolkit
The Wild Center’s Youth Climate Program works to convene, engage, connect, and empower young people around the world for action on climate change through Youth Climate Summits and leadership opportunities. The Youth Climate Summit is a replicable, scalable model that the Wild Center developed and has tested for over six years. This toolkit provides the framework and resources for planning and hosting a successful summit of your own.
Founded in 1986, Youth Service America (YSA) supports a global culture of engaged children and youth committed to a lifetime of meaningful service, learning, and leadership. With half the world’s population under age 25, YSA’s mission is to help all young people find their voice, take action, and make an impact on vital community issues. In 2016, YSA began to focus its assets and outcomes on achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
Through YSA’s programs, youth lead community change through:
- Awareness – educating others to change behaviors
- Service – using their passion, creativity, and idealism to solve problems through volunteerism
- Advocacy – to change policies and laws
- Philanthropy – generating and donating financial and in-kind support
YSA’s Learning Center has resources and trainings for educators, and the website’s Take Action tab provides ideas for service broken out by cause, audience, and YSA Programs.
Other Resources
Farm to Table Projects
Farms and Food
Invasive Species Poster
Gone Fishin
Snakes
Money from a Stonet
Greenprint
GSCQ June 2017
Colarado’s Changing Forest
Environmental Service Learning Projects
The First Americans
Carbon FootprintFeast or Famine
Vernal Pools
The Well Project
Alternative Energy Report
A Child’s Guide to Riverhill Farm
Building Homes
Citizen Science
GCommunity Chicken Coops
EPA Service Learning
Grade 1 – Farms and Food
Grade 1 – Fossils and Dinasauers
Grade 3 – Native American
Grade 6 – Kennewic Man
Guide to Energy Sources
Indy’s Own
Our Bodies
Globe Overview
Prjoect Based Learning in Green Schools
Selections From Raising Awareness 6th Mass Extinction
The Study of Life Cycles
The Out