2025 Earth Day Activities for Middle School
Grades: 6, 7, 8
Type: Lesson Plans
Subjects: Earth and Space Sciences, Geography, English Language Arts
Authors: Population Education
Location: North America > United States, North America > United States > New Mexico
This resource has been reviewed by SubjectToClimate's climate scientists and verified for scientific accuracy and up-to-date information. Learn about our review process →
This resource has been reviewed by SubjectToClimate's climate scientists and verified for scientific accuracy and up-to-date information. Learn about our review process →
Synopsis
- Celebrate Earth Day with your middle school students using one of these four lesson plans that focus on how we produce, use, waste, and need energy.
- Students analyze information and source bias in data about fracking in order to write an argument for or against fracking, develop a model to measure important factors to a sustainable community, interpret data to identify relationships between population growth, greenhouse gas emissions, temperature rise, land ice melt, and sea level rise, and use current event articles to perform a news telecast about what their futures might look like.
Teaching Materials
Positives
- The lesson plans include graphic organizers and scaffolded worksheets for students to use.
- Each lesson includes an assessment to measure what students have learned.
Prerequisites
- Teachers need to submit a short questionnaire to download the packet. The download is free.
- Students will need some background in climate change. This resource can be used if needed.
- Students will also need to be able to identify opinion words and know the meaning of the term bias.
- In the Fracked or Fiction lesson, the map for Artifact #2 is not interactive, as the directions suggest. Because of this, a tablet or computer for this artifact isn't necessary.
- The link for the video Rain Falls at Greenland Ice Summit for the First Time in the lesson People and Climate Change: The Data is In will take students to an article rather than a video. Students may not be able to answer Question 2 with this article.
- Learning about the effects of climate change can be emotionally charged for students. This educator's guide on climate emotions can help you have these conversations with your students.
Differentiation & Implementation
- Follow-up extension activities are provided for each lesson.
- Lessons include alternative procedures that can be used to further scaffold the lessons.
- Check out our Earth Month Calendar and our Earth Day teacher's guide for middle school for more ideas on what to teach around Earth Day.
This resource engages students with various sources focused on sustainability and climate change, focusing on assessing bias in the source material. While generally well-sourced, there are several items which are over ten years old and a few figures in lesson three lack proper citation. Despite these issues, this resource is strongly rooted in sustainability science and is recommended for teaching.
Teaching Tips
Standards
Resource Type and Format
Scientist Reviewed
This resource has been reviewed by SubjectToClimate's climate scientists and verified for scientific accuracy and up-to-date information. Our review process ensures that every resource in our library reflects the current state of climate science.
Learn about our review process →
