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2025 Earth Day Activities for Middle School
Provided by: Population Education
Lesson Plans
678
Synopsis
- Celebrate Earth Day with your middle school students using one of these four lesson plans that focus on how we produce, use, waste, and need energy.
- Students analyze information and source bias in data about fracking in order to write an argument for or against fracking, develop a model to measure important factors to a sustainable community, interpret data to identify relationships between population growth, greenhouse gas emissions, temperature rise, land ice melt, and sea level rise, and use current event articles to perform a news telecast about what their futures might look like.
Subjects: Earth and Space Sciences, Geography, English Language Arts
Authors: Population Education
Region: United States, New Mexico
Languages: English
Teaching Materials
Positives
- The lesson plans include graphic organizers and scaffolded worksheets for students to use.
- Each lesson includes an assessment to measure what students have learned.
Prerequisites
- Teachers need to submit a short questionnaire to download the packet. The download is free.
- Students will need some background in climate change. This resource can be used if needed.
- Students will also need to be able to identify opinion words and know the meaning of the term bias.
- In the Fracked or Fiction lesson, the map for Artifact #2 is not interactive, as the directions suggest. Because of this, a tablet or computer for this artifact isn't necessary.
- The link for the video Rain Falls at Greenland Ice Summit for the First Time in the lesson People and Climate Change: The Data is In will take students to an article rather than a video. Students may not be able to answer Question 2 with this article.
- Learning about the effects of climate change can be emotionally charged for students. This educator's guide on climate emotions can help you have these conversations with your students.
Differentiation & Implementation
- Follow-up extension activities are provided for each lesson.
- Lessons include alternative procedures that can be used to further scaffold the lessons.
- Check out our Earth Month Calendar and our Earth Day teacher's guide for middle school for more ideas on what to teach around Earth Day.
Scientist Notes
Teaching Tips
Standards
Resource Type and Format
About the Partner Provider
Population Education
Population Education provides K-12 teachers with innovative, hands-on lesson plans and professional development to teach about human population growth and its effects on the environment and human well-being. Human population has grown from 1 billion to 8 billion in just over 200 years, so it is critical to examine human impacts on wildlife, climate, and natural resources while working toward equality and justice for the world’s people. Through memorable, standards-aligned classroom activities like simulations, cooperative challenges, and debate, Population Education inspires students to tackle a variety of real-world problems and to become positively engaged in their communities as the next generation of leaders and policy makers.
All resources can be used for your educational purposes with proper attribution to the content provider.
