Lesson Plan: Earth Day

“Mother Earth in the News”

Celebrate Earth Day by exploring the subject of environmental change in current events. Students will use news sources to research an environmental issue and engage in discussion with peers about the key points they learn in this Next Generation Science Standards and Common Core-aligned lesson.

Objectives
Students will:

• Find and analyze a news article about environmental change;
• Explain their key research points to peers and pose questions about peers’ topics for further research.

Standards

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.6.2
  Determine a central idea of a text and how it is conveyed through particular details; provide a summary of the text distinct from personal opinions or judgments.
  
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.6.4
  Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
  
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.6.1.C
  Pose and respond to specific questions with elaboration and detail by making comments that contribute to the topic, text, or issue under discussion.
  
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.6.7
  Conduct short research projects to answer a question, drawing on several sources and refocusing the inquiry when appropriate.
  
• ESS3.C: Human Impacts on Earth Systems
  Human activities have significantly altered the biosphere, sometimes damaging or destroying natural habitats and causing the extinction of other species. But changes to Earth’s environments can have different impacts (negative and positive) for different living things.
  
• ESS3.C: Human Impacts on Earth Systems
  The sustainability of human societies and the biodiversity that supports them requires responsible management of natural resources.
  
• ESS3.D: Global Climate Change
  Though the magnitudes of human impacts are greater than they have ever been, so too are human abilities to model, predict, and manage current and future impacts. Through computer simulations and other studies, important discoveries are still being made about how the ocean, the atmosphere, and the biosphere interact and are modified in response to human activities.

Materials

• Flocabulary Environmental Change video
• Print or online news sources, including Flocabulary’s Week in Rap
• News Story Investigator worksheet

Products Created

• An analysis of a news article and a written response drawing connections to daily life

Time

• 1—2 class periods

Sequence

1. Discuss how every April we celebrate Earth Day, a holiday when we show our support for environmental protection.
2. Watch the Environmental Change video. Have students pick an example of human impact on the environment from the video that they want to explore further, such as global warming, farming or drilling for oil.
3. Have students search for a news article about their topic using print or online news sources. You can also point them to Flocabulary’s Week in Rap, which includes stories about new fracking regulations, the United Nations Climate Summit, carbon emissions in developing countries, Iceland’s decision to pump CO2 into the ground, a crude oil spill in Montana and Obama’s veto of the Keystone Pipeline. Students can use the toolbar on the website to search for their topic to see if there’s a Week in Rap that covers it. If so, they can navigate to the Interactive Lyrics tab and click on the blue text for infoboxes with links to news articles.
4. Have students fill out sections 1-3 of the News Story Investigator worksheet with the 5 W’s of their news article: Who is the story about? What happened? Where did it take place? When did it take place? Why did it happen, and why is the issue important to environmental change? If students did not choose an article from a Week in Rap, they can leave sections 1 and 2 blank.
5. Have students pair up and share their news story and the 5 W’s with their partner. Their partner should ask two remaining questions they have about the topic, which the student should write in section 4 and then do some basic online research to find the answers.

Wrap Up/Extensions:

• Have students write about what, if any, connection they have to the environmental topic in their article. How do they contribute to the issue or its solution? On a smaller scale, what impact do they have on the earth in their daily lives? In what ways are they earth conscious, and what could they do differently to positively affect the environment?
• Challenge students to put one of the strategies for helping the environment that they identified into practice for a day, a week, the rest of the month of April or the rest of the year.

Guided Reflection

• “I used to think _______, and now I think _______.”
• “One thing I learned is __________, and one question I still have is _________.”