50 Games for Going Green


Book Description

Activate your students’ interest in environmental issues with these fun physical activities! With 50 Games for Going Green: Physical Activities That Teach Healthy Environmental Concepts, teachers and youth leaders will find easy-to-present games and activities to inspire and educate students about caring for the environment. Authors Carol Scaini and Carolyn Evans have created a range of innovative activities to help students learn the value of reducing, reusing, and recycling and explore concepts of carbon footprint reduction, climate change, and global warming. 50 Games for Going Green includes • warm-up, circuit, and station activities; • physical fitness challenges, relay races, and literacy and drama activities; and • cooperative games. A special Eco-Thoughts feature offers simple take-aways with each activity, giving your students information to think about, discuss, and act on. Easily adaptable for a range of ages, abilities, and skill levels, this collection of activities will help your students get moving, thinking, and working together while learning what they can do to help the environment. 50 Games for Going Green makes learning a truly active experience and gives you creative ways to help students get their daily dose of moderate to vigorous physical activity. The activities can be played in the gym, classroom, or outdoors and require little or no equipment. Many activities repurpose everyday recyclable items for play, such as cards from recycled paper, balls from socks, and bowling pins from plastic bottles. Detailed descriptions and illustrations make it easy to understand how to teach each activity, and the game finder helps you quickly choose the right one for each class. In addition, the book’s easy-to-follow format provides information for each activity on equipment and setup requirements, instructions for play, variations, and safety considerations. Taking an active learning approach to environmental stewardship makes caring for the Earth a tangible, memorable, and fun experience. By encouraging students to get active and go green, 50 Games for Going Green offers a hands-on way for students to contribute to their physical health and improve the health of their environment.




Learner-Centered Teaching Activities for Environmental and Sustainability Studies


Book Description

Learner-centered teaching is a pedagogical approach that emphasizes the roles of students as participants in and drivers of their own learning. Learner-centered teaching activities go beyond traditional lecturing by helping students construct their own understanding of information, develop skills via hands-on engagement, and encourage personal reflection through metacognitive tasks. In addition, learner-centered classroom approaches may challenge students’ preconceived notions and expand their thinking by confronting them with thought-provoking statements, tasks or scenarios that cause them to pay closer attention and cognitively “see” a topic from new perspectives. Many types of pedagogy fall under the umbrella of learner-centered teaching including laboratory work, group discussions, service and project-based learning, and student-led research, among others. Unfortunately, it is often not possible to use some of these valuable methods in all course situations given constraints of money, space, instructor expertise, class-meeting and instructor preparation time, and the availability of prepared lesson plans and material. Thus, a major challenge for many instructors is how to integrate learner-centered activities widely into their courses. The broad goal of this volume is to help advance environmental education practices that help increase students’ environmental literacy. Having a diverse collection of learner-centered teaching activities is especially useful for helping students develop their environmental literacy because such approaches can help them connect more personally with the material thus increasing the chances for altering the affective and behavioral dimensions of their environmental literacy. This volume differentiates itself from others by providing a unique and diverse collection of classroom activities that can help students develop their knowledge, skills and personal views about many contemporary environmental and sustainability issues. ​ ​ ​




Playing Nature


Book Description

A potent new book examines the overlap between our ecological crisis and video games Video games may be fun and immersive diversions from daily life, but can they go beyond the realm of entertainment to do something serious—like help us save the planet? As one of the signature issues of the twenty-first century, ecological deterioration is seemingly everywhere, but it is rarely considered via the realm of interactive digital play. In Playing Nature, Alenda Y. Chang offers groundbreaking methods for exploring this vital overlap. Arguing that games need to be understood as part of a cultural response to the growing ecological crisis, Playing Nature seeds conversations around key environmental science concepts and terms. Chang suggests several ways to rethink existing game taxonomies and theories of agency while revealing surprising fundamental similarities between game play and scientific work. Gracefully reconciling new media theory with environmental criticism, Playing Nature examines an exciting range of games and related art forms, including historical and contemporary analog and digital games, alternate- and augmented-reality games, museum exhibitions, film, and science fiction. Chang puts her surprising ideas into conversation with leading media studies and environmental humanities scholars like Alexander Galloway, Donna Haraway, and Ursula Heise, ultimately exploring manifold ecological futures—not all of them dystopian.




Environmental Education Games


Book Description




Guide on Simulation and Gaming for Environmental Education


Book Description

Among various possible pedagogical approaches which favor the integration of an environmental dimension into educational processes, gaming and simulation seem particularly suitable to environmental education. Environmental games and simulations reproduce in a simplified and didactical manner the complex nature of concrete environmental problems. The game situation can take into account various factors as well as the values, interests, and behavioral patterns of different social actions (e.g., scientists, government officials, or the general public) which are likely to contribute to the generation and solution of environmental problems. Games and simulation provide the student-players with a framework which helps them to appraise situations in a multidisciplinary perspective, reveals the importance of balancing group values and interests in the solution of environmental problems, and prepares them for efficient decision making. This guide on the design of simulation and gaming aims at providing basic practical knowledge for the purpose of stimulating specialists in charge of curricula and materials development, as well as teachers, to adapt existing games and simulations to their particular situations or to develop original materials of a similar kind. The guide comprises two parts. The first develops fundamentals of gaming and simulation design; the second provides examples of games, including a specific game devised for generating other games. (CW)




Environmental Education Games


Book Description




The Big Book of Nature Activities


Book Description

The average child can identify over one thousand corporate logos, but only ten native plants or animals—a telling indictment of our modern disconnection from nature. Soaring levels of obesity, high rates of ADHD, feelings of stress and social awkwardness, and "Nature Deficit Disorder" are further unintended consequences of a childhood spent primarily indoors. The Big Book of Nature Activities is a comprehensive guide for parents and educators to help youth of all ages explore, appreciate and connect with the natural world. This rich, fully illustrated compendium features: Nature-based skills and activities such as species identification, photography, journaling, and the judicious use of digital technology Ideas, games, and activities grounded in what's happening in nature each season Core concepts that promote environmental literacy, such as climate change and the mechanisms and wonder of evolution, explained using a child-friendly, engaging approach Lists of key species and happenings to observe throughout the year across most of North America Perfect for families, educators, and youth leaders , The Big Book of Nature Activities is packed with crafts, stories, information and inspiration to make outdoor learning fun. Jacob Rodenburg is the Executive Director of the Camp Kawartha summer camp and outdoor education centre. As well as publishing numerous articles on children, nature and the environment, he has worked in the field of outdoor education for twenty-five years. Drew Monkman is an award-winning environmental advocate, naturalist, and retired teacher. In addition to his weekly nature column, Drew is the author of two season-based nature guides, including Nature's Year.




Sharing Nature


Book Description

The Sharing Nature movement has expanded to countries all over the globe. Cornell and his work have been recommended by the Boy Scouts of America, the American Camping Association, the National Audubon Society, Japan's national school system, and many others.




Earthways


Book Description

Seasonal activities, recipes, and hands-on nature crafts for ages 3 and older, designed to produce "a loving relationship with nature" in the classroom or home. Includes tips on recycling, composting, making natural toys and play spaces, and using earth-friendly craft materials and cleaning products.