This service learning program lets you teach outdoors at your local Great Lakes shoreline. Students learn about the environment while they investigate beach health, remove litter, and enter their findings into an online database.
Building a bat house is a great way to help these threatened animals. Once you’ve built your bat house, identified suitable habitat to install it, and it is successfully inhabited, join WDNR’s roost monitoring project. Through this project you can let bat researchers know about what kinds of bats inhabit your bat house, and how many bats you get each year.
*Supports Wisconsin Bat Program
This lesson teaches the next generation of anglers and lake lovers how to keep Wisconsin’s waters clean and free of pesky invaders like the dreaded zebra mussel.
*Supports Clean Boats, Clean Waters
“Damsels and Dragons” describes the physical and behavioral characteristics of
dragonflies and damselflies. Eighty-six species of dragonflies occur throughout
Minnesota. Students also learn about a dragonfly’s life cycle as it metamorphoses
from egg to adult, and about a Minnesota Department of Natural Resources
naturalist, Mark Carroll, who has done research on dragonflies.
*Supports Minnesota Odanata Survey Project
Hands-on learning about streams within and outside of the classroom. This four week long curriculum contains six sections, including a field trip to collect data that will contribute to the Water Action Volunteers Program. Aligned with Science Standards.
Activity packets for ages preschool through high school, along with select activities in Spanish, for use in your classroom. Packets include information about cranes and a variety of activities.
*Supports Annual Midwest Crane Count
With a roll of the die, students simulate the movement of nutrients in a forest ecosystem both before and after earthworms invade to see how & why change can occur in ecosystems as a result of exotic species invasion. Lessons are aligned to standards.
*Supports Great Lakes Worm Watch
Making a earthworm observatory is a great way to see for yourself what earthworms do and how they might change ecosystems when they invade. You can set up a demonstration observatory in your classroom or nature center, or students can use small observatories to conduct their own experiments! Lessons are aligned to standards.
*Supports Great Lakes Worm Watch
Using milkweed plants to detect ozone air pollution, classrooms provide plant injury data to DNR’s air management biomonitoring unit. Students learn about air pollution and its effects on plants and animals, how to set up study plots and collect plant samples, and how to press and preserve plant samples.
Snapshot Wisconsin is a great way to get students outdoors and learn about local wildlife! The project is a unique opportunity to integrate science and technology into your classroom. Educators can volunteer to host a trail camera with their students at a school forest or other property. Students can also help identify and count critters in photos captured across the state by logging on to the Zooniverse website.