Students will attempt to build a sod house by making choices regarding the construction of their house. Too many wrong answers and the house will collapse! This engaging and lighthearted activity will help students understand the challenges settlers faced while trying to survive on the open prairie.

In this lesson, students will research the Adopt a Highway program available in the United States. Students will communicate their ideas of road clean up by writing letters to the principal of their school to convince him/her to be a part of the Adopt a Highway program. This lesson was developed by Amy Smereka as part of their completion of the North Carolina Global Educator Digital Badge program. This lesson plan has been vetted at the local and state level for standards alignment, Global Education focus, and content accuracy.

In this lesson, students will hear a story about the effects of trash in Africa and how it is making people and animals sick. This lesson was developed by Amy Smereka as part of their completion of the North Carolina Global Educator Digital Badge program. This lesson plan has been vetted at the local and state level for standards alignment, Global Education focus, and content accuracy.

In this lesson, students will investigate trash collection in the United States and how it is different from poorer countries such as countries in Africa. This lesson was developed by Amy Smereka as part of their completion of the North Carolina Global Educator Digital Badge program. This lesson plan has been vetted at the local and state level for standards alignment, Global Education focus, and content accuracy.

In this lesson, students will hear inspirational stories about youth who made a big difference in his/her community or village. Their creative ideas and courage helped many people and saved poor villages from famine. This lesson was developed by Amy Smereka as part of their completion of the North Carolina Global Educator Digital Badge program. This lesson plan has been vetted at the local and state level for standards alignment, Global Education focus, and content accuracy.

This inquiry explores how communities develop and sustain themselves by examining the positive and negative impacts of development on community environments. In considering the idea that communities grow and change over time, students develop an argument with evidence that answers the compelling question "How do we shape our environment?"

In this lesson, students define a natural resource and identify the main natural resources present in the Earth.

In this lesson, students learn what forests were like before European settlement and discover how Native Americans altered forests to provide their basic needs. To accomplish this, students read a journal of an explorer, note specific details, and draw an illustration.

Students brainstorm and display on a map a variety of ways they are connected to the ocean.

After the teacher has led a discussion about how we depend on the physical environment and natural resources to meet basic needs and how challenging/impossible it would be to live without all of the resources our environment provides us with, she will lead a discussion with students about how people affect the environment (positively and negatively). Then higher-level students will be asked to write creative skits to inform the audience of ways that people affect the environment and the consequences that humans and animals may face due to the negative effects that we have caused in the environment.  After the higher-level students have written the skits, all students in the class will participate in acting out the skits.  This lesson was developed by NCDPI as part of the Academically and/or Intellectually Gifted Instructional Resources Project. This lesson plan has been vetted at the state level for standards alignment, AIG focus, and content accuracy.

In this animated video from LOOP SCOOPS, a sphinx gives a boy named Oliver a week's worth of garbage and asks him to make it smaller. Oliver removes glass, cans, paper, and plastic for recycling; food scraps for composting; and clothes and toys for donating. He is then surprised to learn that the garbage was his own, and learns the importance of "less chucking, more recycling."

This inquiry is an initial exploration into the concepts of interdependence through the lens of community economics and the idea of an economy as a diverse, mutually supportive web of needs and wants, workers and consumers, and problems and solutions. This inquiry challenges students to understand that through businesses, town organizations, and local governments, a community meets the needs and wants of its people, finding strength in collective efforts to address problems.