Green Curriculum Resources

• U.S. Green Building Council: Best Practices in Green Education
  Educators learn best from hearing the stories of other educators' efforts. USGBC's Best Practices in Green Education brings you model green education and green curriculum to support your efforts in educating for sustainability.
• The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education
  The mission of the Cloud Institute is to ensure the viability of sustainable communities by leveraging changes in K-12 school systems to prepare young people for the shift toward a sustainable future. The Cloud Institute creates educational materials that inspire young people to think about the world, their relation to it, and their ability to influence it in an entirely new way.
• Alliance to Save Energy’s Green Schools Campaign
  This program engages students in creating energy-saving activities in their schools using hands-on, real-world projects. A number of lesson plans for different age groups can be downloaded for free on this site.
• Closing the Loop: Exploring Integrated Waste Management and Resource Conservation
  From the California Integrated Waste Management Board’s Office of Education and the Environment, Closing the Loop is a compilation of 50 lessons to help students discover and nurture an environmental ethic and stewardship for natural resources. The activities focus on solid waste and environmental awareness topics including landfills, recycling, packaging, resource conservation, waste prevention, worm composting and more.
• School Building Week, Council of Educational Facilities Planners International
  School Building Week focuses on high-performing, healthy, safe and sustainable school facilities and their connection to learning. It includes the School of the Future student design competition, which offers middle school students an opportunity to illustrate the kind of creativity they bring to the design process.
• K-12 Energy Lesson Plans and Activities, U.S. Department of Energy
  On this site you'll find links to more than 350 lesson plans and activities on energy efficiency and renewable energy for grades K-12. Each includes a short summary that identifies curriculum integration, time, materials, and national standards.
• Earth Day Network — K-12 Environmental Education Program
  Earth Day Network’s Environmental Education Program provides curriculum resources, games, interactive quizzes and other tools for integrating environmental issues into core curriculum subjects.
• Energy Kid’s Page Energy Information Agency
  This site contains energy-related materials such as history, facts, games, hands-on activities, an energy calculator and research articles for different age groups.
• EPA Teaching Center
  The EPA Teacher Resources Web site contains curriculum and other links to help teachers educate on a variety of environmental topics, from waste and recycling to local environmental cleanup activities. Curriculum for a variety of age groups is available, including links out of the EPA Web site.
• Florida Solar Energy Center
  The Florida Solar Energy Center has developed several environment and energy curriculum for use by teachers.
• Green Schools Energy Project: A Step-by-Step Manual Youth for Environmental Sanity
  A simple, step-by-step guide to help students perform energy “audits” on their schools and then successfully lobby for implementation of positive changes.
• The National Energy Education Development Project
  The NEED program includes innovative curriculum materials, professional development, evaluation tools and recognition for schools that have implemented NEED-oriented curriculum. NEED teaches the scientific concepts of energy and provides objective information about conventional and emerging energy sources —their use and impact on the environment, economy and society. NEED materials are available for all grade levels from kindergarten through high school.
• Population Connection
  Population Connection’s Education Program is the only national, population education program with a strong emphasis on teacher training for educators of grades pre-K through 12. Population education addresses how the human race has grown and shaped the world around us. World population has quadrupled in the past century, changing the way we use natural resources and function as societies. Population education is the ultimate multi-disciplinary field; it’s ecology, human geography, anthropology, economics, biology, public health, sociology, environmental studies, history and civics all rolled into one, with a good bit of mathematics to help us understand where we’ve come from and where we might be headed.
• Sustainability Education Handbook: A Resource Guide for K-12 Teachers Incorporating the Michigan State Framework Standards
  This Handbook has been created to help K-12 teachers understand sustainability concepts and incorporate them into their classroom. In the course of writing this Handbook, the Michigan State Framework Standards and Benchmarks have been evaluated comprehensively for opportunities to integrate sustainability concepts into your existing curriculum. Every sample activity provided in the Handbook correlates to particular state standards and benchmarks.
• The U.S. Green Schools Foundation: This nonprofit organization is dedicated to the implementation of energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable systems and practices in K-12 schools. The foundation’s Web site has links to curriculum resources for educators in a variety of environmental topics, as well as sites for students to visit to explore concepts of green building, solar energy, wind energy, and general energy conservation topics.