Welcome! Get ready to take your students on an easy and inspiring environmental education adventure. Don’t worry – the prep for this project has been thoughtfully designed to be quick and painless. To get started, simply go through the steps below and then you’ll be off to the races.
Once you have completed the prep for the program you can start showing the lesson videos to your students. The lesson resources are included in the side menu. Each lesson includes a list of steps (like the one below – scroll down), a student video, and a buffet of extension activities for you to choose from.
CLICK HERE FOR THE STUDENT BOOKLET
CLICK HERE FOR THE TEACHER GUIDE
Steps
- PRINT – Download, print, fold, and review student booklets. Get the student booklet file here. We recommend printing it single-sided in black & white on letter size paper. Then photocopy the pages double-sided and fold the 3 pages in half to get your booklet. If you have a long-neck stapler, you can staple the pages together.
- PRINT – Consider printing our teacher guide, if you like checklists and feel a paper version could help you stay organized. Our teacher guide contains the lesson checklists, a printed schedule, a place to record your feedback, and more. It’s not essential, but can be useful.
- PLACE – Choose a container to store the student booklets between activities. To help keep student booklets easier to find, we recommend collecting the booklets after each lesson so they don’t get lost. Choose a container to store all the booklets or have a bag designated for each group
- SCHEDULE – Book time in your schedule. Videos run 4-7 minutes long. It is ideal to also provide student writing time (5 minutes) and class discussion time (5 minutes) after viewing the video. You could schedule these once a day for 7 days OR once a week for multiple weeks. When you have completed the Design & Build lesson, you need to schedule some longer chunks of time for students to start building. We recommend at a minimum including 1 design and 2 build sessions. Use the printable scheduling page that follows to schedule your time to complete this project.
- GROUPS – Decide on the size of the groups and who is in each group. We recommend having students work individually to complete their planning booklet first, then share in groups.
- STUDENT SHARE – Consider how students will share their completed projects. You don’t need to decide this now, but start thinking about time to organize the final sharing session. Will they host a community tour for the other groups in the class? Will they host a showcase for other classes? For parents? Define how and when this will happen.
- CHOOSE – Consider what materials will be allowed for the build. Choose what materials you will allow students to use for the build. We encourage using cardboard and paper from the recycling bin. Consider what you will do with the student projects at the end
- DEEP DIVE – Consider taking a deeper dive by using the extension buffet. You can choose to take a deeper dive into each of the lessons (waste, energy, water, transport, food). An extension buffet is available on each lesson page that offers games, outdoor activities, and more
Really Worked: The website is laid out well and provides all the necessary information. The steps (which are bolded) and the checklists teachers can use to help organize the lessons are a nice touch. Easy to print out these forms and put them into a binder to help organize them. Starting with video links is a great touch as students today like the short information provided in a video format. I do like how you start with the Big Picture in mind and use the lessons to chunk learning into manageable sections.
Needs Work: It took me a little bit to realize that the initial student workbook is the culminating activity that is completed after the other lessons are taught. It is a great idea to use the student booklet to help chunk student learning as we work toward the big picture. Folding the booklets: In the directions, it forgets to tell you to reverse the second page in each page of the booklet so it all comes out the right side up. Otherwise, a great tool to support learning. End Project: For me, I dislike projects that we make that end up in the garbage. I recognize that you suggest using as many recyclable products as possible, but that cannot always happen depending on the projects being used. For my end project, I plan to use Minecraft for Education to build their worlds. I am excited that we can take all the learning we have and get quite creative in the manner that we build and represent our city of the future. I recognize this might not work for every class, but I do believe Minecraft for Education would be an excellent tool to pull together all our learning. Or, my other idea would be to show student learning using Google Sites to develop a website. Easy to add writing, videos, and pictures to these sites.
For prep for me, I had a rough time as I was unable to edit the documents to translate and adapt them into French. So it took me a few hours to redo everything. Sigh. For the future, definitely have these in a Word or other format that is easier to edit for teachers like me who need to have resources in another language or adapted to reading and vocabulary levels. I ended up making a booklet with each activity on one page since making the booklet was too complicated. Hopefully, I got them in the right order!
The printable student booklets were easy to copy and staple ready for the students. Prep video and teacher guide are helpful to get started and plan ahead.
I appreciated the well designed website and the easy to understand directions. I struggled copying the student workbook, and spent too much time trying to get our finikey photocopier to cooperate.
I really liked the video links embedded in each lesson.
The way the website is set up is extremely user friendly and easy to follow. I like the simple steps listed at the top of each section to follow. The various extension activities give SO many options for class wide activities to support the big ideas or extension ideas for students who are extra engaged. While I didn’t print the teacher guide, I appreciate that it is an option for teachers who like to keep it printed in a booklet or something that is easy to take on the go.
Easy to understand and schedule with the instructions provided.
I agree with Wanda — it would be nice to have a document that we could edit for the level of our students and for French Immersion. She was nice enough to share her French translation with me so I didn’t have to start from scratch. I ended up taking her work and making it into a booklet like the original but my students have found it to be too little of space for recording and drawing their ideas.
I love the fact that this program is so well laid out and easy to follow. As a busy teacher, it is really nice to have such rich resources embedded in a series of lesson already planned for you. The teacher’s guide is a very useful planning tool.
Booklets
– a little finicky to copy, not a big deal
-perhaps the first page should be at the back with the design pages (I found that some students became rather focused on the ADST project and were desperate to get started on that before all the lessons were presented,)
-it would be nice to have a question the provokes thinking around the big idea of the lesson included in every recording page
– some words were cut off the ends (It may have been the way I copied the booklets.)
Our class participated in the BC Hydro Power Smart for Schools lessons/competition in the fall, and I feel that both programs really complement each other with the common theme of “Sustainability”.