The Pacific Education Institute (PEI) has an amazing website full of fantastic resources. Just mousing over the Our Work menu item displays various resources for any Science, STEM, or Elementary teacher looking for environmental ideas for their curriculum. And if you are a grant writer or considering writing grants to get materials or equipment for your students, environmental projects are great (see my grants post)!
The PEI website has some fantastic Field Guides that are completely free to download and use but for this blog post, I’m going to focus on their incredible English Language Arts Performance Tasks. Click here to go directly to their Performance Tasks section then click on your grade band. Before you can access the free available ELA performance tasks you’ll have to fill out a signup form giving your name, where you work, and your email. It’s totally worth it so I highly recommend going for it without worry. They will send you email updates that are not spammy and are not very frequent.
When I go to the grades 6 – 8 band I see 19 available ELA environmental performance tasks that are very complete, very high quality, and require little to few materials for you the classroom teacher to have to procure. Most of what is needed are linked right on the document. Documents can be printed for students as is! Here’s what the grades 6 – 8 Invasive Plants ELA Performance Task looks like (click on image to see it larger):
All the ELA Performance Tasks, well, at least all the ones that I’ve seen and shared at least, follow the same format as the Invasive Plant one. It comes with directions for the students to follow so it is ready for copying (just make sure you don’t copy the whole PDF file because it includes a scoring guide at the end for the teacher!). To research the prompt, students get a few resources that include articles and videos as well as other media such a graphs and data tables.
The research materials are followed by an amazing notetaking graphic organizer for the students. Then students use their notes to answer some very written questions that require students to use evidence from the media and texts on which they just took notes! Finally, students use all their notes and the answers to the questions to draft an essay. A detailed rubric is provided to help students in the drafting and writing of the essay and the scoring notes provided for the teacher include sample responses.
Very good stuff here! If you try any of these do let me know which one you tried and what you thought of it in the comments section.
