Teach Interactive Environment and Olympics and Science Lessons

Solar House	PicoTurbine Windmill
Ages 12 thru High School	Age 10 thru college

What do the Olympics have in common with environmental science? These creative lesson plans will help you discover the connection and communicate it to your students in the form of fun, engaging environment and Olympics and science lessons.

• You can hold your own version of the Olympic games in your classroom. Have the events focus on environmental themes. One great event might involve picking up litter around the community. Send out your students to collect any litter they see and assign game points based on the type and number of items collected. This will give your students an incentive to clean up the community and would make an otherwise tedious task fun and stimulating!
• Another event to incorporate into environment and Olympics and science lessons is a recycling drive - perhaps focused on a particular item, such as the tabs of aluminum soda cans. These aluminum tabs are some of the most economical to recycle. By focusing on them, you can teach your students how both environmental and cost considerations matter in deciding what will be recycled. Once again, assign points based on the number of tabs students turn in and keep a running total over the course of several weeks or months.
• A contest with more open-ended means of evaluation might entail making creative use of items commonly considered trash. What kinds of useful tools or works of art can your students make out of plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and old items that would otherwise have been thrown away?
• Junk can become treasure if thought of in the right way. What can your students design? This is a great activity to incorporate into environment and Olympics science lessons, science fair projects, and other fun science education opportunities.
• High school science fair projects or activities in environment and Olympics and science lessons might include windmill-building competitions evaluated on the basis of how much energy the windmills generate or how many LEDs they enable to light up. You might even arrange for a similar competition where solar panels are built by students. Here, ambitious and talented students will get the opportunity to really show what they know!

Anything from a 1st grade science fair project to an activity for high school seniors can be approached in the form of environment and Olympics and science lessons. For more ideas, explore these fun energy science projects. Have fun!