Trying to plan an engaging elementary science unit on natural resources? Conserve your energy! This five-part series of lessons and hands-on activities has exactly what you need to teach young scholars about the importance of conservation.

All synthetic materials began as natural materials. An engaging instructional activity begins with a hands-on activity and an example of the type of research that scholars perform independently. Then pupils receive a topic and begin...

North American Indian civilizations had already been in place for over 10,000 years before the arrival of European settlers. Introduce your young historians to Indian tribes that lived in the Chesapeake region in the...

Discuss wants and needs with your elementary ecologists and get them to consider what would happen to our natural resources if we all got everything that we want. Learners play a card sorting game and take an ecological footprint quiz on...

Teach your class some fairly complex terms—factors of production, human resources, capital resources, natural resources, and intermediate goods—with a storybook (Messy Bessey's Holidays), plenty of visuals and handouts, and related...

Learners follow along as the teacher reads Products of Mining in Canada: From Batteries to Vehicles aloud. They then discuss the meaning of key terms and determine the gist of the text. Pupils do a second read and complete a graphic...

A read-aloud anthology closely examines human impact on the Earth while boosting reading comprehension skills. Through stories, scholars examine the concepts of natural resources, pollution, garbage, and recycling and brainstorm...

Both Athens and Sparta made choices to survive in ancient Greece. Those choices were, in essence, economic ones about how to direct resources. A Venn diagram activity and reading ask class members to examine the connection between...

How are maps like fish? They both have scales. The chapter includes six different activities at three different levels. Scholars complete activities using natural resources, learn how to read a map, see how to make a compass rosette,...

Is there a correlation between a country's wealth and the extent of its ecological footprint? What exactly constitutes an ecological footprint, and how does one country stack up against the rest? This is a unique lesson to incorporate...

Up-cycle, or reprocess waste materials, into colorful tie-dye clothing or banners with an activity that uses fruits and vegetable juices as dye sources.

Here's a resource that deserves a place in your curriculum library. As part of their study of War Horse individuals create an anthology of World War I poetry. 

How do Olympic runners succeed in physically demanding events like the 400-meter dash? Physiology scholars explore the relationship between acids, bases, and the muscular system through a scenario-driven activity. The lesson focuses on...

Bubble, bubble, boil and trouble! What causes common substances like baking soda and vinegar to react the way they do? Welcome your junior chemists to the wonders of acid-base chemistry using a comprehensive and fun...

Renewable, recyclable, and biodegradable. As part of their study of the forest ecosystem, class members read "Nature's Treasure Chest" about the many products made from trees and then craft their own recycled paper.

A couple PowerPoint presentations are used to stimulate discussion about the perspectives of different countries on the issue of energy consumption. Afterward, they play a game in which each team is assigned a country, considers its...

What impact do humans have on greenhouse gas emissions? What are the natural causes of these gasses? Thanks to the carbon cycle, carbon dioxide eats away at the earth's atmosphere with the intensified help of humans. Young scientists...

Discover how copying nature can be beneficial to humans. Scholars read articles about examples of biomimicry and its potential applications. Along the way, they learn about Nature's Nine Laws and how they relate to biomimicry. This is...

Scholars independently explore several websites to calculate their ecological footprint. Using their new found knowledge, they answer six short-answer questions and take part in a grand conversation with their peers about how...

When thinking about the American whaling industry most imagine Moby Dick and Nantucket sleigh rides, harpoons and scrimshaw, whale-oil lamps and baleen in women's corsets. But it may come as a surprise that the industry was also...

Young botanists examine the different parts of tress and then draw parallels between the functions of these parts and the function of parts of the human body. 

Your teenagers may have heard of fracking, but do they really know what it is? And could they debate the benefits and risks? Educate your environmental science class with a lesson about hydraulic fracturing, non-renewable energy...

If basketball players make more than teachers, why shouldn't learners all aspire to play in the NBA? Unraveling the cost and benefits of education and future economic success can be tricky. Economic data, real-life cases, and some...

The tenant farming and sharecropping systems that developed in the South after the Civil War, the reasons for their development, and the eventual decline of these systems are the focus of this two-day plan.