Engaging Activities for Your First Weeks

Engaging activities for your first weeks include low-prep, engaging lessons and activities that help 3-5 teachers build community and routines.

Welcome back, 3-5 teachers! If you're looking for a meaningful way to bring climate and nature into your classroom, this guide is a great place to start. Inside, you'll find resources across every subject area that build knowledge, community, and curiosity in equal measure. From quick games and hands-on outdoor activities to science investigations, writing lessons, and real-world math, everything here is ready to use and designed to help your students feel connected to the world around them from the very first week. These fun back-to-school activities for kids work for multiple grade levels and can be differentiated for all learners. Here's to a great year!

Grab-and-go activities, games, and videos that are easy to drop into the first days of school with little to no prep, great for building excitement and community right away.

Back to School Activities

This ready-to-use bundle includes About Me worksheets, SMART goal-setting pages, and climate-themed Bell Ringers to help you build relationships, establish routines, and get students thinking about the natural world from the very first day. 

Recycle Sorting Game

In this interactive game, students practice sorting everyday items into trash, compost, or recycling bins, building real-world environmental awareness while having fun. It works great as a technology-center activity or a whole-class warm-up.

Nature Memory Game

This beautifully illustrated digital memory game has students matching cards featuring coral reefs, the Amazon, rainforest animals, food crops, and world landmarks. It's a fun and visually rich way to open discussions about ecosystems and biodiversity.

Climate Change Video

This video gives students a clear, age-appropriate introduction to what climate change is, what causes it, and what can be done. It's an easy, engaging way to open up a classroom conversation about caring for the planet at the start of a new year.

Outdoor and creative activities that get students building, exploring, and connecting with the natural world. Perfect for setting a curious, collaborative tone early in the year.

Make Friends with a Tree

Students design and build their own tree using a variety of materials, then use standard and nonstandard units of measurement to compare, measure, and describe it. It's a creative, open-ended engineering activity that also strengthens key math skills.

Build an Insect Hotel

Students learn about the role insects play in healthy ecosystems and then build an insect hotel from natural materials to support pollinators and other beneficial insects. It's a hands-on project that combines science, design, and environmental stewardship.

Greenhouse Effect Experiment

Using jars, thermometers, and sunlight, students model how greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere and draw conclusions about global warming. This simple but powerful experiment makes an abstract concept tangible and memorable.

Colors of Place Activity

Students head outside with paint chips, search for objects in nature that match their assigned color, and then work together to map how each object connects to others in the ecosystem. This activity builds systems thinking skills through outdoor exploration.

Standards-aligned science lessons that challenge students to investigate real-world environmental questions through research, experiments, and evidence-based thinking.

Extreme Evolution

Students explore how the Silver Key Anole lizard adapts to climate change, complete an experiment, and write a claim supported by evidence. It's a compelling introduction to adaptation, natural selection, and the real-world effects of a changing climate.

Invasive Species

Students learn how cultural practices can inadvertently spread invasive species, play a game to see how invasive species outcompete native ones, and then research a local invasive species to create an awareness presentation for their community.

Watersheds Science Lesson

Students explore what a watershed is, investigate how human activities impact watershed health, and discuss what communities can do to protect local water sources. The lesson connects science to civic responsibility and real-world environmental stewardship.

A Few of My Favorite Things

In this activity, students choose a tree, plant, or natural feature they care about and investigate its role in the local ecosystem. It's a meaningful way to connect environmental science to students' communities and lived experiences, deepening their sense of place.

Reading and writing activities that build literacy skills through an environmental lens, connecting students to climate topics through research, persuasion, and character study.

Energy Research and Writing

Students research a type of renewable energy, gather evidence from multiple sources, and present their findings in writing. This lesson builds research and writing skills while deepening students' understanding of clean energy.

Persuasive Writing Activity

After learning about the environmental impact of single-use plastics, students use scaffolded pre-writing templates to craft a persuasive piece calling for action. It's a strong introduction to opinion writing with a real-world purpose.

Character Traits Lesson Plan

This simple, reusable graphic organizer helps students record their thoughts and feelings after reading or listening to a climate-related story and identify the characters and setting. It's a helpful tool during the first weeks of school.

Energy Detectives

This companion lesson collection for the book Energy Detectives guides students through interactive readings, opinion letter writing, an eco-friendly science fair, and a home conservation project. It connects ELA, science, and climate action.

Back-to-school math activities that connect operations, fractions, data, and more to climate and sustainability topics, helping students see math as a meaningful tool.

Adding Fractions Worksheet

Students use equivalent fractions to calculate how wind energy is distributed across a community. This worksheet connects fraction skills to real-world renewable energy concepts in a clear, accessible way.

Plastics: Multiplication Activity

Students complete multi-step multiplication problems using data about single-use plastic water bottles, learning how disposable plastics contribute to climate change and how small positive actions can add up to a big impact.

Biking for Good: Math Lesson

Students watch a video about biking to school, create and analyze graphs from a class survey, and explore how biking can help reduce emissions. This lesson connects graphing and data skills to real-world action.

Diet and Carbon Footprint

Using the Climate Change Food Calculator, students calculate the carbon footprint of their meals and consider how changing their habits can reduce their impact. This activity makes data analysis personal and practical.