Category Archives: Activities

Doctors and nurses routinely check “vital signs” (temperature, pulse, blood pressure, breathing, etc.) to get a sense of a person’s health. Similarly, scientists use tools to check an ecosystem’s “vital signs” and assess health. Students practice the Vital Signs Fieldwork Skills that will ultimately help them collect high quality data to determine the health of …

Self-organization and choice are two powerful motivational tools that get students excited and personally invested in the learning or investigating they are about to do. Use this process whenever you want students to team up to learn or investigate something in which they are personally interested, invested, and excited.

The Ecosystem Health Continuum gets students playing and experimenting with their own understanding of and assessment criteria for determining ecosystem health. Students look at a series of photographs of ecosystems that show a range of health. They arrange them along a continuum from healthy to unhealthy, and practice backing up the claims they make using …

Public Service Announcements are short videos that try to convince people to pay attention to something, think differently, or behave a certain way. Students create a series of 30- or 60-second Public Service Announcements that explain, raise awareness, generate support, change behavior, or motivate action!

Use A Picture of Health to prime students to think about what it means to be healthy. Before they tackle ecosystem health, students consider human health – a topic more familiar that they all have personal experience with. Students look at a set of photographs of people that show a range of health. They work …