Project Learning Tree is an award-winning environmental education program designed for teachers and other educators, parents, and community leaders working with youth from preschool through grade 12.

PLT's secondary modules challenge students to explore in-depth the complexity of environmental issues and real-life decisions. Hands-on classroom studies, research, and collaborative field investigations provide opportunities to debate issues and engage with experts.

Project Learning Tree’s Exploring Environmental Issues: Places We Live provides educators with a useful tool for place-based education to help create a bond between young citizens and their communities. Through eight hands-on activities, students will explore current and future community environmental issues, enabling them to make informed decisions about those issues.

Access this 184-page module by purchasing a print copy.

What's included:

Activity 1: Personal Places

Students investigate and report on their connection with a special place and with their greater community.

Activity 2: Community Character

Students explore community character and investigate ways that communities, including their own, are responding to growth and development pressures.

Activity 3: Mapping Your Community Through Time

Student teams investigate the social, cultural, economic, aesthetic, and environmental components of their community to create map overlays and reports describing the development of their community through time.

Activity 4: Neighborhood Design

Students explore the current layout of their neighborhoods, critically evaluate a variety of development options, and formulate ideas for guiding further growth in their communities.

Activity 5: Green Space

Students investigate green infrastructure and native plant communities at the neighborhood, community, and regional scales. They also explore the dual needs to accommodate population growth and to protect green space and native plant communities.

Activity 6: A Vision for the Future

In this activity, student teams develop and present a vision for the future of an area in their community.

Activity 7: Far-Reaching Decisions

Students develop graphic organizers and creative presentations to illustrate how individual decisions can impact the local environment, as well as distant communities. They also measure their own ecological footprint.

Activity 8: Regional Community Issues: The Ogallala Aquifer

Students investigate a regional issue as they adopt the roles of shareholders and debate solutions to the depletion of North America’s largest aquifer.

Here are some comments about PLT’s Places We Live module:

“This module contains powerful activities that encouraged my students to explore real-world problems and allowed them to work together to solve the problems.”

– South Carolina Educator

“The student interacted well with the readings- they were challenged with the new information and utilized some of their prior knowledge of their community.”

– New Mexico Educator

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If you are a teacher, librarian, or administrator looking to place an order with a purchase order, please contact PLT's Sales & Marketing Coordinator at PLT@forests.org.