🌎 Our six favorite environmental science programs for kids (and grownups).

Happy Earth Day! In this special earth day issue, we're share our favorite environmental literacy program to use at home with kids.

Environmental science is on our “Oops, we forgot to teach this at school” category on Modulo (along with financial literacy and coding) because it’s one of the most relevant topics that has a direct and substantial impact on children’s lives, but is woefully neglected in the traditional school system. Scientists learned about climate change in the early 1900’s, first began warning humans about climate change in the 1950s, started reaching a widespread scientific consensus in the 1980s, but we didn’t start including it in our public school curriculum until 2013. Even today, Texas is considering legislation that would remove climate change from state-wide curriculum textbooks.

Curriculum is still highly politicized and it takes time to integrate into a nationally standardized education system. This is why it’s so vital that families take learning into their own hands.

Environmental literacy is much more comprehensive than just teaching kids about climate change. It incorporates atmospheric sciences, ecology, environmental chemistry, geosciences, as well as social sciences: practical actions for protecting the environment and cultivating a sustainable future.

What we looked for

A good environmental science curriculum is evidence-based, accurate, based on scientific consensus, but still giving students room to form their own opinions. It is also balanced, in that it shares multiple viewpoints in the context of scientific evidence. It is not “neutral science” that claims well-documented scientific evidence could be true or false. Many think of balanced information as sharing two highly politicized sides, but this would be an incomplete and inaccurate way to relate research.

Don’t despair, do something

In the past, most environmental science curriculum was fear-based, including dire warnings about the future in order to motivate people to change. Over the years, psychologists have helped the environmental science community to understand that this approach is ineffectual, leading to anxiety, paralysis and even severe mental health problems. A good environmental science curriculum does not scare and paralyze learners, but offers concrete steps to make positive change in a realistic context.

Even with the best intentions, many environmental literacy programs are still not fully rooted in scientific understanding and more focused on propagating a certain point of view, sharing anecdotal, or not thoroughly documented information about risks and ways to help (even ones written by scientists). We also tried to avoid these curricula that were overly biased and not well-documented, to select the most diligent, scholarly, well-designed curricula based on well-established scientific evidence from the most reliably, scholarly, peer-reviewed sources.

This post includes our five favorite curricula to teach kids about environmental science. I also included Project Drawdown, the resource I use to teach myself about environmental science as I continue to learn and grow, as an adult. I truly love this resource and wish it had been available to my as a teen when I first learned about climate change, felt terrified, and was looking for ways to help that could actually make a difference. Now, I focus on expanding universal access to education, as I’ve learned it is one of the top ten ways to address climate change.

Our criteria for selecting curricula

• Mastery-Based

• Secular

• Rooted in scientific understanding

• Accurate

• Standards-Based

• Comprehensive

• Accurate, in-depth information about climate change

• Not fear-based, action-oriented

• Fun and engaging

About affiliate links:

About affiliate links: Some of the programs we recommend include affiliate links. We have marked them with a star. When you purchase this curricula through our blog, we receive a small commission that helps fund the development of our content and community. These links do NOT impact our choice of curriculum to recommend. We are extremely selective about the curricula we choose to recommend. All curriculum recommended has been thoroughly reviewed by the Modulo team, tested with our students and referred to us by multiple families because it is engaging, effective and rooted in understanding. We choose all curricula before investigating whether or not they have curriculum links.

Without further ado, here are our six favorite environmental literacy programs. As a bonus, we’ll also share four nature-based curricula we love.

FREE PICK

1. California Education and Environment Initiative (K-12)

The California Education and Environment effort is a free program developed as part of a statewide mandate to integrate environmental literacy into K12 public schools in California. The EEI curriculum includes 85 units that incorporate state learning standards in history, science, ELA and social studies into learning about the environment. Grades K-3 and 6th also have units available in Spanish. Additionally, the state of California invested six million dollars to help Ten Strands develop and distribute new, standards-based, open resources to teach children about equity, climate change and social justice. The resources are highly engaging, including maps, worksheets, projects and hands-on activities. Families who want to use EEI can simply visit the Ten Strands website and choose their topic (History-Social, Science, Spanish-Translated Units or Maps), and then select their grade level. The materials are available in PDF on a Google Drive folder, and can be printed or used online.

Adaptive, online program

2. Mystery Science (K-5th grades)

One of our favorite online science programs, Mystery Science provides engaging science lessons that aligned with standards for every state. Children watch compelling videos on a concept, and are prompted to perform small projects and worksheets related to the concepts they’re learning throughout the lessons. Each lesson has a list of materials that families can easily find around the house. Mystery Science delivers reliable, bite-size units about climate change, earth science, biodiversity, sustainability and engineering. Mystery Science also includes lessons on what kids can do to protect earth’s environment. It’s an incredibly well-scaffolded program that’s easy for kids to use on their own, or with a friend. Their homeschool membership for individual families costs $89/year. Here’s an example lesson called “How can We Protect Earth’s Environments?” for families to try with kids.

Best for high school

3. Oak Meadow environmental science (K-12)