Environmental Education – At Home Edition

As the voice of our forests, Forests Ontario is always looking for ways to support environmental education and awareness, at school and at home. School’s out, indefinitely and a little earlier than expected, but students still need to continue their educational journey. Luckily, there are ample opportunities for educational learning at home, indoors and outdoors!

We’ve compiled a collection of our favourite lesson plans, activities, and webinars about our forests for you to explore. You’ll find resources for independent play and study, and some that require instruction and supervision, but they are all modifiable.

 Grade K to 3 Lesson Plans

 Grade 4 to 6 Lesson Plans

Activities

 Webinars/Videos

Climate Change: The Need for Action (Webinar): An introduction to global and local climate change including the impacts climate change has on lands, soils, forests, wildlife, and water.

Food Systems and Climate Change (Webinar): Explore how our food system is both a main contributor to climate change but also a potentially significant solution, identify how to help solve the climate crisis.

Let it Bee: Conserving Wild Bees (Webinar): The importance of pollination, wild bee biodiversity, threats to bees and how the public can support bee species at-risk of extinction.

Climate Change in Ontario (Webinar): A 2017 discussion with Environmental Commissioner, Dr. Dianne Saxe, on how much climate change is already affecting Ontario; Ontario’s current greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; and what the provincial government is doing to reduce emissions.

Get the Dirt on Soils (Webinar): An introduction to the importance of soil in our daily lives.

Bird & Wildlife Monitoring (Webinar): A discussion of methods commonly applied to wildlife for environmental monitoring, actions taken to protect or improve bird habitat, and how everyone can help monitor wildlife through phone apps and volunteer and citizen science opportunities.

Soil Texture (Webinar): An overview of soil texture and its importance as a soil physical property.

Reading a Soil Profile (Webinar): Using visual interpretation skills to identify soil horizons and parent materials in a variety of soil profiles.

Second Nature: Biological Emulation (Webinar): Explore biomimicry and the way that nature is transforming the way we think, behave and create.

Farming Practices: Value of Healthy Soil (Webinar): Learn about what soil health is and how to improve soil health for future generations.

Sustainable Forest Management: Learn about different parts of sustainable forest management.

How Much Wood do you Chuck: An estimate of how much wood we consume on a daily basis!

Different Forests, Different Management: Learn about the differences in forest management across ecologically diverse Ontario.