Climate Action Days

 On these four days, every school community in New York City will engage in climate action to build a better future, for our students and our planet.

What Are Climate Action Days? 

Four days where every NYC Public School will showcase the importance of climate education and sustainability practices. Like Earth Day, these are days to galvanize action, but focused on celebrating solutions and schoolwide action. Everyone will come together to celebrate solutions and show our students that we are committed to building a better future.

Curriculum Resources and Activities

Choose Your Own Adventure Roadmaps

The Climate Education Leadership Team developed lesson and activity ideas for your school to choose from. These are suggestions - you can follow them exactly, or take inspiration to modify them or make your own!

How to use the roadmaps:

1. Choose a schoolwide action. This is a simple action that your whole school can participate in. To implement it, it's as simple as making morning announcements and emailing your colleagues to let them know!

2. Select a roadmap with lessons and activities to support your schoolwide action:

   • Choose based on the time-commitment required: Mild (1-2 hours), Medium (3-5 hours), or Spicy (5+ hours)

   • Then choose a type of activity: learning, project-based actions, or advocacy

   • Your roadmap gives you a breakdown of steps you can take to plan and implement climate action in your school. Remember, these lessons and activities all lead up to your schoolwide action on Climate Action Day!

2024-25 Climate Action Day Roadmaps (example below): 

Collective Action: Catch Basin Clean Up

For this theme’s Collective Action, we are encouraging schools to participate in a Catch Basin Cleanout! This aims to reduce and prevent litter making it's way into our sewer system.

Partner Resource Directory

We worked with our partner community-based organizations to create a database of relevant resources for Climate Action Days.

When you open the Partner Resource Directory below, you will see a list of organizations on the left most column. Use the filters at the top of the database to sort through the resources and find the ones that are most relevant to what you need. You can filter by Climate Action Day theme, resource type, grade level, free/paid resources, and more.

Once you have selected filters that match what you’re looking for, click the resource title to learn more about it.

To see all the resources for each partner, click the triangle to the left of the partner organization name.

More detailed instructions.

Click here to view the Partner Resource Directory full-screen.

Climate Action Days - Success Stories

Curious what other schools did last year for Climate Action Days? 

Click here to view the Success Stories full screen.  You can filter by district and borough.

Communication Materials to Engage Your School