Welcome to the Elementary STEM Coach Podcast. I’m your host, Naomi Meredith, a former classroom teacher turned K-5 STEM teacher and coach. With over a decade of experience teaching and a master’s degree in STEM leadership, I’m here to coach you throughout the year to help you gain back more time to create innovative experiences for your students.

Earth Day is April 22nd and this is a great day or time of year to teach students ways that they can take care of their Earth. I will be sharing with you five STEM lessons that you can teach your students all about Earth Day, but there are also things that you can teach year round. When I was planning this episode and really when I plan any episode, I go through everything that I have recorded and also past blog posts to see what have I done or what haven’t I done and what would be a good episode.

I do have a blog post about Earth Day with some activities. Some I will be mentioning here, but there are some different ones, but I didn’t have a podcast. So I was really excited that I get to talk about these STEM activities for you.

So let’s jump into these lessons. They cover a broad range of grade levels and you can teach them all year long. The first one is an Earth Day Engineer Inspiration Board and this is a great STEM station for your youngest learners, particularly in pre-K through second grade.

I posted over on my Instagram at Naomi Meredith underscore a snapshot on how to set up this station and I’ll also embed it in the show notes for this episode, but all you have to do is print out this board and it has nine different images that relate to ways that you can take care of the earth. It does say Earth Day on it, but it has those nine different ways visually displayed and labeled for students and you get to decide what materials you want at the station for students to build with. They can be reusable materials like Lego bricks, blocks, wooden planks, but it also could be recycled materials as well, like cardboard, egg cartons, those types of things.

All you have to do is put those things at a station, the board and the building materials and students can choose which item they would like to build. If you want to go deeper into this project, there’s also a planning sheet where students can thoughtfully plan and label their design, but definitely up to you. I love throwing in these Engineer Inspiration Boards when I do STEM stations or if I need a quick sub plan, whether I’m the sub or someone’s subbing for me because it’s super low prep and you just use what you have on hand.

So it’s a great talking point and you can get students building right away. The next STEM lesson is to have students build their own recycling plant and they can sort the different materials that come through into the correct categories. Now, I was very curious about how this lesson would go and I started it off by showing students how things get from your home all the way to a recycling plant and I found a really good video for this.

The kids really like this video and most likely they haven’t seen this in action. Maybe they’ve seen recycling get picked up at their home, but they just don’t know where it goes. So that was really cool to show those students what the behind the scenes is in this situation and then I had different items printed out for them and their goal is to create their own little sorting facility where the items can go through their recycling plant and then they can sort them in the correct categories.

This is also a great thing for kids to take home so they can talk to their families about recycling and how it relates to them and where they live. Bonus points to if you use actual recycled materials to build the recycling plants. That’s really fun as well.

The next two lessons involve 3D printing and if you don’t have a 3D printer, don’t skip ahead in this episode. I’ve said this before, but you can actually do 3D printing lessons without having a 3D printer. You can have students do all the research, the planning, and the design, but maybe their thing doesn’t get printed.

You just share it digitally and that is definitely okay. So like I said, you could do this whole lesson without the 3D printer. So I have two different lessons.

The first one is going to be better for your younger students and then the other one is going to be better for your older students, but you can mix and match how you need to. This one for the younger students is students are going to be creating a key chain to help remind them of ways to take care of the earth. So throughout the week or however much time you have, you’ll be teaching students different ways they can take care of the earth, whether it’s about composting, saving water, that recycling lesson, you can mix and match.

And then with the platform of your choice, I like to use Doodle 3D Transform. Students design that key chain and eventually when you get those printed, they could even color their key chain using paint markers to bring their key chain to life. When I did this project, I didn’t really think about having a hole already in their design, so I actually hole punched a hole in their 3D print just the way that they printed.

They were thin enough where I could use a jewelry maker hole punch and I was hammering these key chains and putting the key chain in, but you could be a little bit more smart about it where you tell students to add a hole or you check their designs and add a hole for them so it prints that way. The other 3D print lesson is to again teach students ways that they can take care of the earth at their level. You could use things in Epic Books, you could have a collection that you share with them, but this one is where they actually design an invention that will help take care of the earth.

So it’s not like I can recycle like the little kids, I can do this, I can do this. You’re taking it up a notch where students are actually creating the invention and I always tell kids with inventions, inventions can be something brand new that has never been thought of or it could be building off of something else. So this one’s really cool because there’s a lot of storytelling that goes behind their invention and they could create it with that 3D print.

You could also do it with Makerspace materials too. You could take this same lesson, but their medium is with Makerspace and they’re telling that story, what is the problem they’re trying to solve? What are the resources they’re trying to conserve? Are they trying to clean something up? So it goes into those different ways that you can take care of the earth, but in a deeper level. All of these lessons, by the way, you can find in my TBT shop, Naomi Meredith, and I have a ton of research that is already in there for these types of projects, these project-based learning types of things, where it’s already researched for you, has those graphic organizers, where it takes them on that path of ways that they can take care of the earth.

This next one is really interesting and it’s a type of pollution that kids might not have thought of, but in this next STEM lesson, students are creating a podcast that will teach others about what light pollution is and why it is harmful. This whole lesson actually stemmed from when I was getting my master’s in STEM leadership, and this was one of the topics that we could create a lesson about, and I was really, I actually didn’t know too much about light pollution, where it’s when you look out in the night sky, depending on where you live, and if you can see the stars or not, it’s the human light that is actually causing disruption in lots of different ways, whether it’s sleep, it’s in animals’ patterns and how they behave, all the, there’s different types of things light pollution plays into. So students will research about this lesser-known pollution and then create a podcast that’s a couple minutes long, they create the script to teach others about it in ways that you can help solve it.

Especially for your older students, if they’ve done lessons every year about taking care of the Earth, which is very important, mixing it up with a topic like this they might not know a lot about really does keep their engagement, and at the same time, you’re teaching them how to podcast. Now, I already shared with you the five lessons, but if you want a little bulletin board that you can hang up during this time or any time of year, this one was really fun for me to put together, but it’s a bulletin board and has a smiling Earth, and it says inventions that our Earth loves, and it’s different types of inventions that help take care of the Earth, like solar panels, wind turbines, even as simple as reusable water bottles. So there’s all these little hearts that surround the Earth that encourages kids to think about, oh, there’s inventions that are creating good and making our Earth happy.

Which of these lessons would you try in your classroom? Like I said, you can grab these in my TPT shop, Naomi Meredith, where everything is all ready to go for you, so you don’t have to think about the research or the things for you to talk about, and you can dive into helping students realize there are lots of ways out there that they can help take care of the Earth and even take action today. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of the Elementary STEM Coach Podcast. I would love to connect with you over on Instagram at Naomi Meredith or send me an email to elementarystemcoachpodcast at gmail.com. Also, make sure to check out my website NaomiMeredith.com to see all the show notes from today’s episode and shop my K-5 STEM resources.

Any questions you have, needs for resources, or ideas for episodes, get in touch. I’ll talk to you soon.