Environmental Science Activities Kit: Ready-to-Use Lessons, Labs, and Worksheets for Grades 7-12

This activities kit contains 37 relevant, engaging, and relatively challenging activities for high school students. As a first year enviro teacher, I was so thankful when I discovered this book at the library. It divides activities by the following units: human issues, land use issues, wildlife issues, water issues, atmospheric issues, and energy issues. Even though I can see the point of the reviewer who rated this book a 1 out of 5, I would argue that since environmental science is an interdisciplinary course this book finds a decent balance between the physical science and social science issues of the class, especially for the non-AP course. I previously noted that I thought this book was relatively challenging, and I said this because I believe this book attacks those higher order thinking skills on Bloom's taxonomy, e.g. application-evaluation. Where as other lab books can be very cookbook-ish, and only tackle the lower level skills, like define and identify. Regardless of your teaching philosophy, I believe this book is a must have, if not as an aid for laboratories and "science" lessons, it can serve as a great engagement piece for your units.

Adaptable and useful for classroom, scouts, 4H, or professional development or seminars. The activities can be adapted for a wide range of ages.

Unfortunately this isnt what I thought I was purchasing when I read the description so I am stuck with a book that I will never use. Its not worth it to return it because returning it will cost me close to the same amount that I paid for it. It arrived in excellent condition and it has clean pages. Again, this isnt what I thought I wanted to order so that mistake is on me. But returning it just isnt worth it.

It's seems like a nice support to an existing environmental science curriculum. As far as I can tell, the "activities" are research based in which students go to the library, write a response or create a call to action. For my science class, I was hoping for more lab based environmental studies. For example, measuring the amount of rainfall versus pH. I will continue to peruse the book. I will adjust my comments if I have made an error in my initial review.

Good resource

Some students are content with basic coursework but for those students with a fire in their bellies this is a wonderful source of enrichment material that places learning responsibility squarely on the shoulders of students who want to know more. I especially like the activity-starting backround reading which places the activity in a meaningful context. Fine work, Mr. Roa.

I really like this book! I use it as the backbone for all of my science lessons. The book lists the content standards for each lesson as well as multiple activities for each lesson. The lessons can be modified up or down, which is really helpful when working with multiple ability levels.

Great text with full lessons and student readings. I did change the order of some of the units but other than that it was easy to use and the students really enjoyed it during summer school.