By Linda Desai, 2005 PLT National Outstanding Educator

Nothing like PLT’s Energy and Society kit activities to step up your energy level, not to mention your energy knowledge! As a facilitator of the Energy & Society workshops and user of these materials in my environmental education programming, I have had the opportunity to see the importance of these activities in the classroom.

If you haven’t taken this workshop yet, put it on your list of things to do. Why? This kit takes the concept of energy, that intangible ever present force, from the basics to the complex and makes the connection of energy to everyday life. Between this kit and other supplemental PLT activities that support this concept, the science of energy becomes relevant.

Why is this important? In my work at the Placer Nature Center, I find children more often than not are unaware of their connections to the natural resources that sustain them. Maybe they know where their milk comes from, but what about their shoes, CD player, bike, and T-shirt? These connections are unclear yet important if we want to build stewards of our environment. Integrating activities from Energy and Society and PLT can enrich standard-based curriculum while relating these concepts to everyday life.

I like to start my workshops with “Energy Challenge,” a perfect icebreaker. Rather than playing this activity like jeopardy as designed in the activity guide, I have my group team up and match the answers to the card. This helps me to see what they already know about energy. It also takes them to task but does not intimidate, and the process of elimination makes for a very successful game with lots of discussion. What a great pre and posttest this would make in the classroom.

Teachers attest that the music and movement in the Billy B CD are great learning tools. What better way to understand potential and kinetic energy than through song and dance?  Just like commercial ditties, the lyrics are easily learned and take meaning when you start to apply them. Activity 1 “Energy Detectives” leads students in searching for sources and forms of energy on the “Where is the Energy” poster. This allows students a tangible way to demonstrate their understanding of the concepts. Teachers were impressed with the posters that come with the kit because of their interdisciplinary use. Old and new energy sources are depicted creating a strand to social science. Language arts is also covered in the energy journal. At workshops, I have separate teams brainstorm how they use energy for caring for themselves, learning, fun, and getting around. Teachers, like students, can’t believe how energy use adds up when you stop to think about it!

Another of my favorites that covers a concept I find poorly understood by teachers and students alike is in Activity 2 “May the Source Be with You.” What is the difference between a renewable and a nonrenewable resource?  By definition it may seem easy. Renewable resources can renew themselves through natural processes like any product made from a plant or animal. Nonrenewable resources, being those made from minerals or fossil fuels, are limited in supply. However, application will stump teachers and students alike. I have developed an outreach program for middle school students called “Smart Energy Choices” to enhance this understanding.

At workshops or with students, I start with a warm up to the concept by having students or teachers sort everyday products by their natural resource source, renewable or nonrenewable. PLT’s 2006 PreK-8 Guide’s Activity 14, “Renewable or Not” would be another warm-up activity. Cans, clothes, paper products, glass, plastics, metal, and eggshells are just a few of the products to sort. Plastics, among students are the most mysterious as to its source (fossil fuels) and as they sort product after product, the dependency on plastic bags, plastic containers, toys, clothes just to name a few, illustrates our dependency on fossil fuels other than just gas in our cars!  

I find after this warm up is a good time to bring in the secret life of these products, which I integrate into my Smart Energy Choices program. PLT’s 2006 PreK-8 Guide’s Activity 52, “A Look at Aluminum” is a good start. What is a product’s life cycle? US EPA has materials free for teachers that follow the life cycle of a CD charting materials acquisition, manufacturing, distributing and recycling. Where do these natural resources come from? The Minerals Information Institute, (www.mii.org) has charts (and many other free teacher packets) that illustrate minerals imported by the United States. The global dependencies for most any product come alive through this search! Students are amazed that 35 different minerals are needed just to build a computer. Can they imagine the energy needed just to get the materials to the point of manufacturing? Now doesn’t it make sense to recycle those nonrenewable natural resources and reason how it could be that 95% of the energy is saved when recycling aluminum cans! More on the secret life of products can be found in Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, by John C Ryan and Alan Thein Durning.

Jumping into PLT’s Energy & Society kit’s Activity 2, “May the Source Be with You” takes on more meaning after the above activity. In this activity, energy resources, illustrated on the poster “Where is the Energy”, are sorted into renewable and nonrenewable. Teachers and students were successful at picking those out but how many knew where their own energy sources come from? Sadly, few. Questions, connections! 

Driving home students’ personal energy use, Activity 5, “In the Driver’s Seat” investigates personal travel by having students keep a travel log. Transportation is one form of energy they use everyday and in a number of ways (hopefully – like walking!). I find it useful to look at their total energy and natural resource use picture and incorporate along with the travel log a chart on their other energy-consuming and recycling habits. Twelve questions are asked today, and again next week and repeated next month. Tracked by the teacher or peer-to-peer review will indicate whether behaviors have changed to those that promote saving our natural resources while saving energy.

One last challenge comes from PLT’s 2006 PreK-8 Guide’s Activity 84, “The Global Climate.” Can they make energy efficiency and conservation changes that add up to “Saving a Ton of CO2”? I recently presented this challenge to over 600 middle school students and asked them why should we bother? Why do we want to keep CO2 out of the air? Most of my answers were “because it makes the ozone hole”. Only 3 students of multiple classes new the connection between CO2  and global warming. “The Global Climate” helps to clarify this misconception and facilitate students in exploring ways to reduce CO2.

That initial reaction I get from students, however, fuels my passion to connect students to their environment and their life, and I shall use up all my energy doing it!