Celebrate our Earth this Month with These Environmental-Friendly Lessons

Caring for the environment is our farmers' and landowners' most important job. If we don’t use our natural resources wisely, we may not be able to grow food in the future.

This Earth Day (April 22) week, plan to use one of these lessons to show how we work to protect our planet!

Primary & Intermediate

Garden Ecosystems are Awesome
Learn the parts of the garden ecosystem, what living things need to survive, interdependence, and habitats.

The Water Cycle

Students will learn about the cycle of water—the important processes of accumulation, evaporation, condensation, and precipitation, and what causes water to move throughout the earth and its atmosphere.

 

The Business of Bees

Learn the life cycle, jobs, and communication skills of honey bees!

 
 

If the World Were an Apple

The point of this lesson is to teach students to learn the importance of topsoil, the amount of topsoil we have, and why we should care for it.

 

Intermediate & Secondary

The Kentucky Farm as an Ecosystem
Kentucky Proud/KyAEC Lesson
​Grades 4-8, HS Enrichment
​
Students will learn how a farm is an ecosystem, identify the parts of the farm ecosystem and how they interact and depend on one another, identify the producers and consumers in a farm ecosystem, model the food chain/food web within a farm ecosystem, learn how changes affect the farm ecosystem and availability of food, identify the natural resources in a farm ecosystem and ways to protect them, and understand the size of their personal ecosystem.

Learn more​

 

Wad-a-Watershed

Students examine the basic geography of a watershed, how water flows through the system, and how people can impact the quality of our water. Grades 3-5

 

Let's Make Clean Water
Middle School Science - Students will:

  • Identify the various parts of the water cycle.

  • Identify and explain how groundwater is created.

  • Design and construct an earth system model that will create groundwater.

 

Read About Kentucky Conservation Efforts

Need a reading component for middle or high school students? If so, use these profiles of Kentucky farmers that are leaders in sustainability. There are corresponding reading comprehension questions that are aligned to Kentucky Academic Standards for reading informational texts.

Secondary

Journey 2050 is a FREE agriculture education program that challenges participants to answer, “How will we sustainably feed nearly 10 billion people by the year 2050?” This is a wonderful resource for your middle or high school science, social studies, or agriculture classroom. View the webinar, then visit the site.

Be sure also to check out the National Agriculture in the Classroom Curriculum Matrix:

Eden Elwell