Education and the Environment Initiative Curriculum

Brief Description: This curriculum is composed of engaging informational text and student activities. The goal of the lessons are to: improve student's scientific literacy through building critical thinking and problem solving skills, encourage collaboration and communication, and inspire creativity and innovation.

STEM Subject: Science
Other Subject: History and Economics
Grades: Kindergarten to 8th grade
Student participants: Unspecified
Format: Student workbook (PDF) and Teacher's edition (PDF)

Description: The Education and the Environment Initiative (EEI) is California’s groundbreaking, first-in-the nation K-12 environmental education curriculum. The EEI Curriculum is 85 K-12 grade units that teach California content standards in Science and History-Social Science to mastery. It’s California State Board of Education-approved, teaches select California science and history/social science standards and helps support Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards. The California EEI Curriculum is a great resource for teaching the Common Core State Standards (Common Core). Throughout the EEI, you will find engaging informational text and student activities that support Common Core standards in English Language Arts and Science and History/Social Science Literacy. The EEI lessons help build critical thinking and problem solving, encourage collaboration and communication, and inspire creativity and innovation – all goals of the Common Core. Created with teachers’ needs in mind, the following correlation documents identify specific Common Core standards addressed in each EEI unit, enabling you to incorporate these rich and engaging environment-based science and history/social science lessons into your instruction, while simultaneously addressing new Common Core requirements. In addition, the California EEI Curriculum is a natural fit for supporting the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).  Many of NGSS’ science and engineering practices include engaging in argument from evidence, obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information, developing and using models, and analyzing and interpreting data

Each EEI Curriculum unit contains a combination of teacher, classroom and student components that are chalk full of engaging lessons and informational texts. All completed guides are posted, with more coming online soon.

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