Writing Activities for Earth Day

Teaching students how to be excellent writers improves their abilities to communicate and enhances their creativity. Most importantly, writing develops critical thinkers. Below you will find a variety of resources featuring writing activities for Earth Day. It’s never been easier to integrate environmental issues like climate change while teaching your students key writing skills and meeting curriculum standards. Earth Month is the perfect time to challenge your students to write about mother nature, the environment, natural resources, animals, and climate change solutions.

Grades 6-12

In this writing activity from Action for the Climate Emergency (ACE), students will learn how climate change is impacting their state and write a personal narrative to their elected officials on why climate change is an important issue to them. This interdisciplinary lesson plan includes videos, links to helpful information, a teacher guide, and a student worksheet in both PDF and Google Doc formats. Writing a personal narrative is a great way to help students practice mindfulness and make the connection between their personal experiences and climate change topics. When students see how their own lives and communities are impacted by the climate crisis, they will develop a greater understanding of sustainability and the importance of protecting and taking good care of the Earth in our daily lives.

Grades K-3

This easy-to-implement activity gives young students a chance to practice their writing skills while thinking about the value and importance of the natural world. Students find a natural object (stick, flower, rock, etc.) and write a short speech to share with classmates in a nature Show-and-Tell. Teachers can brainstorm to personalize this activity in a number of ways. Advanced students could provide two or more scientific facts about their object, while students who are still working on their writing skills could use sentence stems and word banks to help them write their sentences. Students who are not yet ready to produce full sentences can write the first letter of their object and draw a picture to explain the scientific fact that they learned about their object.

Grades 6-8

In this innovative lesson from SubjectToClimate, students will view powerful climate change-related photographs from Climate Visuals and select one photograph to be the subject of an ekphrastic poem. This cleverly designed lesson plan includes both teacher and student slideshows, making it easy for teachers to use in person or in a virtual setting. This lesson will appeal to students who find descriptive writing ideas challenging, because the photograph provides a visual touchstone to help guide student writing. The lesson includes a mix of photographs depicting climate disasters and climate solutions. It may be interesting to have the students who chose climate disaster photographs present their poems first and follow with students who chose climate solutions photographs. After the students have presented their poems, students could think about whether any of the “problem” poems could be paired with the “solution” poems. Use this for free earth day writing, spring writing prompts, earth day crafts, and more!

Grades 9-12

In this exciting activity, students write a script and perform a monologue about climate change. The student pages link to three examples of climate monologues to help students understand the effective elements of a monologue. Students will have the opportunity to practice various skills such as communication, creativity, confidence, self-expression, writing, and acting as they think about the effects of climate change on the Earth. While this activity is perfect for a drama, public speaking, or theater class, it would also work well in an ELA class as as a fun earth day activity.  

Grades 6-8

These lesson plans can be used individually or collectively to help students practice their paragraph writing skills as they unpack the causes and effects of climate change as well as solutions to combat the crisis. After watching a number of videos and discussing the issues, students will use the instructions and template in the student document to produce a claim-evidence-reasoning paragraph. These lessons will get students thinking about how climate change impacts the world around them and what can be done to stop it. Writing a well-structured, evidence-based paragraph is a skill that will serve students throughout their academic careers and beyond! 

Grades K-2

This well-designed handwriting activity from ClimateScience includes a teacher guide and student handout in a free printable PDF format. The goal of this activity is to practice writing and spelling and to raise children's awareness of how climate change is affecting our planet. Using the ClimateScience book, “Saving Planet Earthly”, students will practice handwriting skills by copying sentences and creating short stories. While the main goal of this Earth Day writing activity is to practice handwriting, teachers can extend the activity by asking students to write two sentences of their own about Earthly. Early finishers can follow this activity with another fun writing activity from ClimateScience, Write a Letter to Thoko. 

Grades 6-8

In this activity, students learn about the purpose of climate policies and are empowered to write some of their own. This resource includes a step-by-step teacher guide and student handout with creative writing prompts and questions that guide students as they draft their policies. The writing resource also includes links to sources that can help students learn more about crafting policies. Teachers can extend this lesson into a role-playing activity where different members of a community act out the consequences of one of the policies created. After role-playing, students can decide whether or not they should amend their policies. Teachers will appreciate the straightforward application to social studies, civics, and government classes.

Grades 6-12

Write Your Member Of Congress is a training module that teaches students how to write a climate advocacy letter to a member of Congress encouraging them to take action. The resource includes information about the power of writing to your representatives, written instructions for crafting a letter, a sample letter, and a how-to video. Some students may be surprised to learn that writing to members of Congress can have a real and direct impact on legislation. This resource offers a hands-on approach to students, guiding them through the letter-writing process: from considering their talking points to being, “personal, polite, and factual”. Once they have polished their letters, students can use the link in the resource to find their Representative’s email address and send their letters. This empowering activity will help students see the importance of developing their writing skills so that they can communicate and advocate for their future and take care of the future of the planet.

Grades 3-5

This activity empowers students to speak boldly and publicly about the urgency of the climate crisis by learning to write and perform a 1-2 minute speech. The resource comes with a teacher’s guide, and videos of young climate activists Alexandria Villaseñor, Greta Thunberg, and Severn Cullis-Suzuki giving speeches. Teachers can use this activity to teach students about the United Nations and the importance of diplomacy and nations working together. Teachers could have students research different parts of the world to learn how climate change impacts each region and to incorporate the information into their speeches. When students give their speeches, the class will be able to learn about how climate change affects different parts of the world in different ways.

Grades 9-12

In this well-crafted writing activity, students will learn about op-ed writing and write about a climate topic that is meaningful to them. Students will learn about the reasons people write op-eds, how to write an op-ed, what makes this writing form unique, and the power of op-eds to create change. The lesson plan provides links to the OpEd Project website and to two excellent video lectures, which will help prepare students for the lesson. Students will enjoy the lesson because they get to choose a climate topic they care about. This activity calls for at least two days or sessions, but can easily be scaled up into a more lengthy writing unit. As an extension, teachers can demonstrate a way for students to share their op-eds with a larger audience, such as their school or local newspaper. Encourage writing such as recycling, reusing, using less water, and more.

Grades 9-12

This innovative lesson plan from SubjectToClimate teaches students about the severity of deforestation and introduces them to odes and elegies. Students have the opportunity to research and learn about how deforestation affects specific regions and to write their own poems as tribute to the lost forests. After they finish crafting their odes or elegies, students share their poems with the class before writing a collective class poem to reflect on what they have learned about the devastating effects of deforestation. This interesting lesson features a simple-to-follow lesson plan, Google slides, and a student organizer document for efficiently structuring their work. As an extension, teachers could have learners write both an ode and an elegy and compare the differences in writing, tone, and overall effect. This lesson is easily adaptable to Advanced Placement or honors level classes by including other literary and language elements in the poems such as juxtaposition, oxymoron, consonance, assonance, enjambment, alliteration, and personification.

Grades 6-12

In this outdoor journaling activity, students spend time observing the natural environment and then answer one of three prompts on happiness, anxiety, or self-esteem. Students will learn that spending time in nature can be an important component of mental health. Unlike some writing activities, this one focuses less on writing skills and more on social-emotional well-being and the role that journaling can play in processing emotions. The English Language Arts writing resource provides three different journal prompts. Teachers could use different prompts throughout the year or let students choose the prompt that they would like to write about. Students who feel comfortable sharing their responses could read them out loud or swap journals with another student. 

One of the simplest methods to teach students about climate change is by incorporating Earth Day writing prompts related to climate change into your daily lessons by offering these free Earth Day resources. Teaching students about climate change through writing activities allows their inner voices to be heard and shared. Inspiring others through our words is the greatest academic freebie we can give our students and this planet on April 22nd, which is Earth Day. Check out more writing activities here!

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