Activities for Grades 7-12
If your students are interested in helping the planet, here are some inquiry-based or hands-on activities. Each provides opportunities for cross-curricular learning and can be incorporated into standards-based learning. Tweens and teens are eager to jump into the world as active citizens. Arm them with the knowledge they need to do so effectively.
Visit an animal sanctuary.
Visit an animal sanctuary. Many animal sanctuaries are allowing private tours for small groups at this time—us included! Visiting a sanctuary allows students to see animals as individuals, which makes it a bit more difficult to see them as food. It also allows them to connect to and empathize with farmed animals on a person level by learning their personal stories and the fates they escaped. Combine your outing with a challenge to go vegan for a day, a week, or a lifetime. After, students can construct a multi-media infographic explaining how going vegan is the best thing a person can do for the Earth. Can’t visit a sanctuary? That’s okay—why not sponsor a rescued animal? Let everyone vote on YOUR animal. You’ll get updates and feel good about the difference you’re making in someone’s life.
Bring Earth to life.
Bring
life to Earth.
Plant some seeds. Students love to get dirty. Kids (of all ages) find digging in cool dirt calming, and find satisfaction in watching their seeds sprout to life. If you have a school or community garden in which to transplant the plants once they start growing, even better. A garden is a long-term commitment that teaches students responsibility and the pride in a job well done over time.
You can plant vegetables that students can eat, native flowers, or a pollinator pathway garden. Bonus for the last choice: The bees, hummingbirds, butterflies and other pollinators that visit provide a whole new lesson in life cycles, migration, ecology, and the importance of pollinators in our food web (assign a research project to accompany it!).
If your environment allows, you can even build a firefly habitat—those lovely, floating lights that symbolize summer, and are inexplicably disappearing.
Recycle trash into art.
Make a bottle cap mural. Making art from trash is incredibly empowering to students: they’re practicing good citizenship by cleaning the Earth, and creating something beautiful and tangible through their ideas and physical efforts. Bottle cap murals meet art standards and require collaboration between students. Even better, it allow students to learn how to use power tools! Run a school-wide bottle cap collection using clear bags outside the cafeteria doors. Students will be amazed at how fast the bag fills up. Start small if you don’t have a lot of time. Or…go big and make this a school-wide project, if you do.
Art can be made from all sorts of “trash”. Show kids some well-known works made from discarded items. If you focus on plastic items, you can work in a lesson the dangers of plastic in the environment, and how plastic is hurting the Earth. The statistics are terrifying.
Veganize it.
Veganize your cafeteria. Schools are required to meet the nutrition standards set by the USDA, but those aren’t always the best—they include milk at every meal, and leafy greens just once a week. French fries can qualify for the vegetable servings. Challenge your students to fight for vegan meal options (not just the fruit that comes with the meal) at every meal, every day. PETA provides a guide to walk your students through the process. This activity meets citizenship and health standards…and a victory would be equally important to farmed animals, too.
Once that’s done, on to the next challenge: starting a school compost bin!
Become citizen scientists.
Become a scientist. There are so many trackers that allow students to collect helpful data about our planet, animals, insects, and more. Students will work alongside other global citizens who share the goal of caring for our planet. The Scistarter website allows you to search for a project just right for your class to take part in together. ISeeChange, for example, encourages users to submit photos of their local environment, where scientists will use the data to analyze climate change.
The website Zooniverse hosts several other studies students can contribute to, such as the Plankton Project. Tie in a recent film like Seaspiracy to deepen understanding of the problems that begin at the bottom of the food chain.
Discuss
compassionate
poems.
Share poems that illustrate compassion with students. For example compare “Allowables” by Nikki Giovanni with “Mercy” by Rudy Franisco. Discuss the allegory each poem makes, opening up the discussion to issues of equity and injustice facing innocent people and animals today. Challenge students to find—or write—their own examples of poems about the virtues of being compassion and being open-minded to the experiences of others. A simpler, less subtle poem is Shel Silverstein’s “Point of View.” Allow students to prepare a presentation of their choice of poem, and explain its meaning and how it affected them. When the opportunity presents, discuss intersectionalism, and that true justice means justice for ALL.
Get granted.
Apply for grants for environmental activities. It’s one thing to start an after-school club, but another thing to apply for and receive funding in order to accomplish a task you dreamed up. This age group is just beginning to open their minds to the idea of a world beyond theirs. For many students, pursuing a grant will be their first experience with seeing a big-picture dream come true. A quick Google search turns up grant opportunities for after-school clubs that will benefit the Earth, including those with vegetarian and plant-based themes, and others that focus on achieving UN’s 17 sustainability goals.
Get outside.
Take a nature bath. The Japanese get it: they started the idea of bathing in nature, which is not what it sounds like. It’s turning your phone off, and letting nature bath you. The benefits are undeniable. If a forest is unavailable, an urban park will do the trick. Even a video of green space has been known to knock the stress down a few pegs. Challenge students to sit quietly in their surroundings for a period of time (10 minutes is a lot for a young adult). Add to the fun by organizing a geocaching challenge using one of many GPS-enabled apps. You can even hide the item yourself. If we want our children to protect our planet, they need to be given opportunities to appreciate it, and feel at home in it. Because they are.
Take a Virtual Tour.
Take a virtual tour. At Tamerlaine, we offer virtual tours that teach about compassion and the role of animal agriculture in climate change—with a side of adorable thrown in. In 2020, many companies discovered the wider audience they can reach through virtual tours. For example, Nature offers stunning and informative virtual tours on each of Earth’s biomes. Encourage students to work in small groups or as individuals in order to attend all the offerings. Then, host a round-table event where each student reports back on what they’ve learned. If we want our children to care for the Earth better than we have, we need to instill in them a sense of awe at its breathtaking beauty, and guide them to understand that we are so interconnected.
Explore Renewable Energy.
Build a wind turbine, test solar energy, or, for more advanced students, demonstrate the power of water. Explain to students the detrimental effects of our nonrenewable energy resources on climate change, and why our current model isn’t renewable—we need to find a way to rely more on renewable, clean resources. These activities meet several science and engineering standards.
You can incorporate ELA and social studies standards by assigning the book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind about William Kamkwamba, who created a windmill from scraps that ultimately saves his village from starvation. When discussing the book, make sure to draw students’ attention to the inequality of their lives vs. William’s life.
Consider running a contest for students to create a powerful way to harness renewable energy.