This curriculum was created to spread environmental awareness through a scientific perspective using fun outdoor labs and activities. The activities included can all be done outdoors and students often discover the environmental significance of concepts for themselves through hands-on learning. Learning environmental science outdoors has been proven to be more effective in improving ecological behavior and improving students ability to connect science to protecting the environment.
I created this curriculum as part of my gold award for Girl Scouts. The Gold Award is a project where Girl Scouts see a need in the world and their community and put together an action plan to address it. The need I saw was a lack of environmental education opportunities that were genuinely engaging and effective in changing young people's ecological behavior. I had done a research project for school that indicated outdoor education was far more effective at improving ecological behavior. I also saw a lack of understanding in my community of the science behind environmental issues. This lead me to create this take action plan of creating this curriculum for outdoor environmental science and implementing it in the form of a summer camp.
Over the summer I tried out all of these activities in the form of a summer camp. Each of the four days had one of the four main topics in this curriculum and we did each activity tied to it. We also had open ended discussions each day about how the students could apply the environmental science topics they learned to protecting the environment. I measured the success of the curriculum based on two surveys. One before and after survey testing their knowledge of environmental science concepts and another one month after the camp measuring their ecological behavior and attitude. To learn more about the camp, how you can create one, or other ways to use the curriculum see the "Ways To Utilize the Curriculum" Page.