Goals

• To use material learned in Global Change Biology to bring basic concepts of environmental awareness to Sandra Breiland’s morning kindergarten class.
• To discover what ideas of conservation and environment are already present at the kindergarten level.
• To provide the children with a sense of their role in the environment.
• To explore strategies of teaching environmental education by creating two days of activity based programs.

Lesson Plan

Day One

• What is the environment? Write the word and draw a picture. It’s okay if you don’t know exactly what the word means, draw whatever it makes you think of.

Three stations:

1. Food webs: What does each animal, plant, or fungi eat? How are they connected? What happens when one drops out? Construct a food web by assigning each child the role of an animal and using yarn to show connections or “who eats who”
2. Recycling: What can you recycle in Northfield? What can you reuse, what can’t you reuse? Why do you recycle? Where do things go when you recycle? Activity: Provide two bins and a garbage can. Give each child a pile of “garbage” and let them practice sorting recyclables and reusables.
3. Tree and forest appreciation: Why are trees valuable? What do you make out of trees? Who cuts trees down? What happens when there are no more trees? Activity: Read and discuss The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein

Day Two

• Read The Lorax, by Dr. Seuss
• Discuss the implications of ecosystem destruction
• Make paper!
• What is the environment? Write the word and draw a picture.

Challenges

• To become familiar with effective teaching methods used in a kindergarten setting.
• To present our material in such a fashion as to be understood by five and six year old children.
• To devise a way of assessing the children’s comprehension and absorption of the material.

Assessment of Environmental Education at Longfellow School

Overall, we felt that this was a very effective project. The children paid attention throughout our lessons and were active participants in our hands-on activities. They seemed to enjoy everything that we presented to them.

Mrs. Breiland, the teacher, commended us on our curriculum and offered us some constructive criticism. Her main points were that we were inaccurate in the amount of time we allotted for each day. We had allowed an hour for Day One’s program and ended up needing at least an hour and forty-five minutes. She also suggested a little more preperation so that we were completely ready for the kids and they did not have to wait for us to set up at all. Her last criticism was that we should have planned the activities so that one activity was not distracting from the others. For example, the recycling activity involved enough movement that the kids from the tree group were distracted.

In order to assess how much the kids learned we had them draw a picture of the envoiromment as soon as we arrived in the classroom. We told them that there is no right or wrong answer, and if they have no idea what the environment is to just draw what comes into their heads. We asked them to do the same thing as a conclusion to Day Two. By looking at the differences in the pictures it was very obvious that the kids learned a lot from our curriculum. A good example is a girl whose first drawing was of the White House and whose second drawing was of a rainbow, trees, and a river. Clearly, there was a definite development in the children’s understanding of the environment.