Happy Earth Day! In celebration of this important day, I'd like
to share with you a couple of resources you can use to help
bring Earth Day (or week!) into your classroom while still
hitting the standards you need to teach. What We do Adds Up
(Grades 4-6) is an activity that allows students to use math to
help them see the impact of how much trash we produce each day.
When this is multiplied by the number of people in a classroom,
a school, a city and so on, it can make a big impression on a
group of students. (This would be a great activity to do after
going on a trash pick-up walk. My students were dumbfounded when
we filled an entire 20 gallon bag with trash today in only 45
minutes of picking up!) This activity targets multiplication
skills. The Trash We Pass (Grades 4-7) This activity gets
students hands-on (literally!) with their trash as they examine
and weigh the trash they have produced as a class. The point of
the lesson? To teach students about waste and get them thinking
about recyclable and dispo