Lessons & Resources for Educators
Download The Lesson: Soil Is Not Trivial
Brief Description: Using facts about the Dust Bowl, students write questions and playa trivia activity focused around the establishment of a national soil conservation program and the importance of soil. Students then explore and/or develop a plan to address a local soil conservation issue.
Download This Lesson: What Piece Of The Pie?
Brief Description: Students explore the economics of consumer food products by analyzing who gets what portion of the price we pay for our food.
Download This Lesson: Step By Step
Brief Description: Students study the sequence of production to discover the resources required and the variety of careers involved to take a raw food from the farm to the consumer.
Download This Lesson: Perc Through The Pores
Brief Description: By pretending to become soil particles and water droplets, students simulate soil particle sizes and their pore space.
Download This Lesson: Let’s Celebrate!
Brief Description: Students explore in their own lives and in the lives of others the role of celebrations and important foods involved, with a focus on corn.
Download This Lesson: It All Starts With A
Brief Description: Students conduct surveys to learn what agriculture provides to people. They organize, simplify, and communicate their findings using tallies, frequency tables, and histograms.
Download This Lesson: Don’t Use It All Up!
Brief Description: Students participate in a sponge demonstration to discover that people are consumers of resources and explore methods of conserving those resources.
Download This Lesson: In Harmony
Brief Description: Students develop mapmaking, map reading, and graph reading skills as they learn the capabilities and limitations of our land resources by using a soil survey. In the process students begin to develop the knowledge needed to build a foundation for understanding the complex issues involved in making land use decisions in harmony with the land’s capability.
Download This Lesson: From Sea To Shining Sea
Brief Description: Students complete a United States map showing the locations of the states, their capitals, and the top five agricultural commodities in each state. They then identify and graph the top five commodities nationally after compiling the information.
