Students at Foulks Ranch Elementary School, with teacher and National Geographic Education Fellow Jim Bentley, completed the final phase of their Geo-Inquiry project to address the question, “How can we make water more accessible and reduce plastic waste in our parks and school?” The students helped Cosumnes Community Services District park administrators install a bottle-filling station […]
It is a beautiful Friday morning in May when Ten Strands team members Karen Cowe, Ariel Whitson, Mike Howe, and I arrive at Dixie Elementary School in San Rafael, California. After gathering in front of the school’s jungle gym playground, we head to the front office, where we are instructed to sign-in and choose one […]
Region 10 of the California Regional Environmental Education Community (CREEC) Network is massive. It encompasses all of what is affectionately called RIMS: Riverside, Inyo, Mono, and San Bernardino counties, almost a quarter of the state’s geographic area. Expanding the work of environmental literacy in this region is made more difficult by the region’s far-flung boundaries, […]
“This was a wonderful week—fun balanced with lots of things to take away and try with my kids … a much deeper appreciation of environmental literacy.” The first of three planned Elementary Environmental Literacy Summer Institutes was presented to K–5 teachers by the Alameda Unified School District (USD) in summer 2017. The Bay Area Science […]
On November 8, 2017 California’s State Board of Education (SBE) approved a new California Science Test Blueprint—the next step in the process of fully implementing the state’s new science standards, the Next Generation Science Standards. This phase is a normal part of the implementation process that involves: adoption of new standards; development of new curriculum […]
The California Regional Environmental Education Community (CREEC) Network is a program of the California Department of Education to support environmental literacy of California’s students by providing teachers with access to high quality environmental education (EE) resources. In addition to being the Director of Environmental Education at TreePeople, I am also the CREEC Coordinator for Los […]
How can educators better understand and teach environmental literacy in our schools? With support from California’s Environmental Literacy Steering Committee and the California Subject Matter Projects, the California International Studies Project (CISP) created a new professional learning program to address this challenge. Working with teachers in Sonoma and Long Beach this summer, CISP launched a […]
We couldn’t have asked for a better setting for our environmental literacy retreat. Thanks to Ten Strands and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, regional site directors from the California History–Social Science Project had the opportunity to gather in mid August in Pacifica to think over how best to integrate environmental literacy into K–12 history–social science (HSS) […]