Generation Earth

Generation Earth provides downloadable project toolkits and guides on a variety of environmental topics including water pollution prevention, waste reduction, e-waste collection, textile recycling, food rescue, composting and more. These guides provide the instructions and support materials needed to implement meaningful environmental projects in the classroom, on the school campus or out in the community. Don’t know where to start? Check out our Teacher Starter Kit for a detailed pathway to complete an environmental service learning project with your students.

Teacher Starter Kit

This comprehensive guide introduces teachers to the Generation Earth approach to environmental service learning. It contains valuable background information on environment-based education and step-by-step guidance for completing a service learning project.

In this guide, you will find a sampling of resources from other Generation Earth toolkits as well as a project idea map activity. The project idea map can be a tool used for an initial planning brainstorm or a living document that is updated as planning continues. From there, explore a variety of project ideas and helpful tips for utilizing other Generation Earth project toolkits. Finally, this guide offers ideas for project reflection and demonstration which encourage students to show what they have learned to others, as well as themselves. The Generation Earth pre-project and post-project surveys are a great way for students to see their own progress.

Water Pollution Prevention Toolkit

This toolkit helps teachers and students explore water pollution, conservation, and complete projects on campus or in the community using a range of Project Guides.

Waste Reduction & Recycling Toolkit

This toolkit explores the waste on a typical school campus – from what can be found in the trash cans after each meal is served, to classrooms and school offices. This exploration will help your group reduce waste on campus by creating goals, relationships with key stakeholders and offering a variety of options to reduce waste on campus. This toolkit contains a waste audit guide, waste reduction interview and step-by-step instructions on how to set up a waste reduction project on a school campus.

Water Pollution & Prevention Education Campaign

An education campaign is a great way to inform a specific audience about the issues related to stormwater pollution and ways people can address these issues. This guide will help your group raise awareness about stormwater pollution through an education campaign.

Waste Reduction & Recycling Education Campaign

An education campaign is a great way to inform and address waste issues to a specific audience. This guide will help your group raise awareness about waste through an educational campaign.

Community Swap

This guide will help your school promote the reuse of items and reduce waste in the process. A student-run swap can be used as a platform to support communities in Los Angeles County, bringing environmental education and empowering individual neighborhoods to share resources and grow together.

E-Waste Collection

This guide provides steps to follow when setting up an E-waste collection event. This allows students to organize and advertise the event so that community members are able to participate.

Textile Recycling

This guide will help your school promote the reuse of items and reduce waste in the process. Proper disposal of textile waste includes keeping it out of landfills through sharing, swapping, donating, recycling and repurposing. Your group can play a major part in creating awareness of proper disposal by hosting a textile recycling event.

Food Rescue

This guide explores the edible food waste on a typical school campus – from what can be found in the trash cans after each meal served to classrooms that serve breakfast and snacks. This exploration will help your group recover food waste on campus by creating a plan, establishing relationships with key stakeholders, finding resources and implementing a sustainable program.

Composting

This guide explores compostable food and green waste at a typical school campus. This exploration helps recover food waste on campus by creating a plan, establishing relationships with key stakeholders, installing compost bins and implementing a composting program.

Campus/Community Cleanup Event

In this guide, students will learn how to organize a successful campus or community cleanup event that reduces trash and other pollution on campus.

Campus Curbside Recycling

This guide will help students answer specific questions and make decisions that will help build a campus curbside recycling plan.

There are many great resources available to help you and your students learn more about the environment.

LOCAL RESOURCES

Aquarium of the Pacific
The Aquarium of the Pacific is one of the largest aquariums in the United States. It's nearly 1,000 species fill 19 major habitats and 32 focus exhibits and take visitors on a journey throughout the Pacific Ocean's three regions: Southern California/Baja, the Tropical Pacific and the Northern Pacific. They offer a wide array of programs for preschool to adult ages.

Audubon Center at Debs Park
The Center's mission is to inspire people to experience, understand and care for the local natural world. The nature-based education and community programs at Debs Park are designed to engage children and their families in the outdoor world, and to give them a personal stake in its protection by making environmental issues relevant to their lives.

Cabrillo Marine Aquarium
Cabrillo Marine Aquarium is an educational, recreational and research facility devoted to encouraging active public participation to promote knowledge and conservation of marine life in Southern California.

Clean LA
Clean LA is a County of Los Angeles portal to programs that help residents, businesses and government keep the County clean and sustainable.

Community Nature Connection
Community Nature Connection is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, envisioning a world where all communities impacted by systems of injustice and oppression have access to public spaces outdoors and are supported by an unwavering commitment to accessibility, community, equity, inclusion, justice, and shared leadership. CNC collaborates with community based organizations to provide inclusive programs that directly address barriers to access.

Environmental Defenders
The Environmental Defenders Rock the Planet – You Can Change the World Tour is a 30-minute, high-energy assembly program that is free to all elementary schools in Los Angeles County. This exciting, music-driven show encourages students in grades K-5 to identify environmental issues and actions kids can take themselves to reduce and prevent pollution.

Heal the Bay
Heal the Bay provides hands on, interdisciplinary educational programs for students K-12. Their topics cover a range of programs, including pollution awareness and prevention, stormwater education, and environmental stewardship.

Latino Outdoors - Los Angeles
Latino Outdoors mission is to inspire, connect, and engage Latino communities in the outdoors and embrace cultura y familia as part of the outdoor narrative, ensuring Latino history, heritage, and leadership are valued and represented.

The Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden
Occupying the heart of the historic Rancho Santa Anita, The Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden is a unique 127 acre historical museum and botanic garden located in the city of Arcadia. Home to plant collections from all over the world, including many rare and endangered species, the Arboretum also houses outdoor historical landmarks representative of the major phases of California history. The Arboretum offers numerous outdoor education programs for children and families.

Los Angeles County Library
Kids and teachers can access the current virtual programming as well as having access to the libraries online books, book clubs, homework assistance, animated books, activities, etc.

Los Angeles County Office of Education
The Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) is the nation's largest regional education agency. Under the leadership of Los Angeles County Superintendent of Schools Debra Duardo, LACOE provides a range of programs and services to support the county's 80 school districts and more than 2 million preschool and school-age children.

Los Angeles Environmental Learning Center at Hyperion
The Los Angeles Environmental Learning Center at Hyperion (ELC) was developed to bring textbook and classroom learning to life while showcasing the City's commitment to protecting public health and the environment. The ELC addresses the need for increased public environmental education through docent led tours of our environmental education exhibits which are compliant to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Visitors explore their role in Clean Water Treatment and Conservation, Watershed Protection and Solids Resources Management.

Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors: CAN THE TRASH! Clean Beach Poster Contest
Students in grades 3-5 are invited to enter Los Angeles County's CAN THE TRASH! Clean Beach Poster Contest. Winners will have their artwork displayed around trash barrels on the beach.

Nature for All
Nature for All's goal is to build a diverse base of support for ensuring that everyone in the Los Angeles area - no matter where they live - has equitable access to the wide range of benefits that nature can provide.

Roots and Shoots
Roots & Shoots provides educators with real tools that develop students’ 21st-century learning skills, such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and a spirit of collaboration. The Roots & Shoots model and curriculum allows you to guide students through the 4-Step Formula to identify projects, grow compassionate traits, and teach leadership skills to cultivate a generation of change-makers.

Star Eco Station
Working in collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other government and environmental organizations, STAR ECO Station provides a last chance for illegal or abandoned at-risk exotic wildlife, as well as environmental education outreach programs in over 40 California school districts.

TreePeople
TreePeople's mission is to inspire the people of Los Angeles to take personal responsibility for the urban forest - educating, training and supporting residents as they plant and care for trees and improve the neighborhoods in which they live, learn, work and play. The K-12 education programs raise environmental awareness, while enriching academic lessons and teaching life skills.

STATE RESOURCES

Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies - Project WILD
Project WILD's mission is to provide wildlife-based conservation and environmental education that fosters responsible actions toward wildlife and related natural resources. All curriculum materials are backed by sound educational practices and theory, and represent the work of many professionals within the fields of education and natural resource management from across the country.

California Department of Conservation
The Department of Conservation provides services and information that promote environmental health, economic vitality, informed land use decisions and sound management of our state's natural resources. The website provides facts and information that students and teachers can use for school projects.

California Education and the Environment Initiative
The Education and the Environment Initiative (EEI) is a free, state-sponsored K-12 curriculum that teaches science and history-social science standards through an environmental lens.

CalRecycle
California's Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery's website is a one-stop-shop for information about recycling in California.

California Regional Environmental Education Community (CREEC)
The California Regional Environmental Education Community (CREEC) Network is an educational project whose mission is to develop a communication network, which provides educators with access to environmental education resources to enhance the environmental literacy of California students.

Erase the Waste
The Erase the Waste public education campaign is designed to reduce harmful storm water pollution in Los Angeles County and improve the environment of the region's coastal and inland communities.

Strategic Energy Innovations (SEI)
SEI's Energize Schools Program provides holistic services to engage, inspire, and empower K-12 students to become environmental leaders, green their campus and community, and develop green career awareness and skills through hands-on, experiential learning. They provide teachers with project-based curriculum, teacher training, and direct instructional support to build student awareness and skills for energy and sustainability leadership and careers.

Ten Strands
Ten Strands mission is to strengthen the partnerships and strategies that will bring environmental literacy to all of California's K - 12 students, their website provides news about Environmental Literacy in California and professional development opportunities for teachers.

Think Earth Foundation
The Foundation strives to create an environmentally aware generation of business and community leaders who will "think earth" by balancing their own needs against those of the environment. For fun activities that can be done with students grades K-5 click here.

Water Education Foundation's Project WET
Project WET works with educators, resource managers, community leaders and concerned citizens in educating young people about one of the most precious resources on the planet - water.

NATIONAL RESOURCES

EarthEcho International
EarthEcho International’s Educator Resources are a collection of videos, lesson plans, and other materials designed to support high-quality classroom experiences. They are unique tools to assist educators as they equip young people to explore and protect their local natural resources. Many of the resources are designed to satisfy Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards.

Keep America Beautiful
Keep America Beautiful is a national nonprofit public education organization dedicated to engaging individuals to take greater responsibility for improving their local community environments.

North American Association for Environmental Education
NAAEE serves as the professional association and champion for environmental education, working with professionals around the world to advance environmental literacy and civic engagement to create a more equitable and sustainable future.

National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF)
The National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF) is the nation’s leading organization in lifelong environmental learning, creating opportunities for people to experience and learn about the environment in ways that improve their lives and the health of the planet. Congressionally chartered in 1990 as a 501c3 nonprofit to complement the work of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), NEEF is a non-partisan, non-advocacy organization working to make the environment more accessible, relatable, relevant, and connected to people’s daily lives.