Project Learning Tree: Cultivating Environmental Stewardship Through Education

Project Learning Tree (PLT) is an award-winning environmental education program designed for teachers and informal educators working with students from early childhood through high school. As one of the most widely used environmental education programs both in the United States and internationally, PLT sets a high standard for excellence in the field. It utilizes the forest as a gateway to understanding the natural world, fostering in young people an awareness and knowledge of the environment and their role within it.

A Comprehensive Curriculum for All Ages

PLT offers a diverse range of curricula tailored to different age groups and learning objectives. These programs aim to engage students through hands-on activities, interdisciplinary approaches, and real-world applications, fostering a deeper understanding of environmental concepts and promoting responsible decision-making.

Early Childhood Education

PLT's Early Childhood guide encourages young children to explore, discover, and communicate through their senses. These experiences emphasize outdoor adventures, fun learning, and the use of imagination and creativity, both individually and in groups. Activities incorporate music and movement, using CDs to encourage singing and dancing. This program specifically caters to the needs of early childhood educators and younger learners, teaching them about the environment and how they can make a difference while developing skills in language, mathematics, and science. PLT’s GreenSchools for Early Childhood includes an Educator Guide and five Investigations, accessible online upon registration.

Elementary and Middle School

The PreK-8 Environmental Education Activity Guide contains 96 interdisciplinary, hands-on activities that integrate the environment into the classroom and bring students into the environment. These engaging activities emphasize science, reading, writing, mathematics, and social studies, covering topics such as trees and forests, wildlife, water, air, energy, waste, climate change, invasive species, and community planning. Each activity is tailored to specific grade levels and learning objectives, building critical thinking skills and utilizing differentiated instruction techniques.

Treemendous Science!: Designed for K-2 students, this program allows students to explore and collect tree data to develop understandings about how trees grow, the roles trees play in ecosystems, and the ways in which trees and humans interact. Treemendous Science! is organized around three levels, corresponding to kindergarten (Level A), first grade (Level B), and second grade (Level C).
Energy in Ecosystems: Designed for students in grades 3-5, this program investigates the ways in which organisms depend on each other to survive and thrive. Students focus on forests-one of the largest and most complex types of ecosystems-and come to understand some of the interactions present in all ecosystems.
Discover Your Urban Forest: This downloadable resource for educators of students in grades 6-8 invites learners to explore their urban environment and investigate environmental issues that affect their urban community. Three hands-on activities, with an emphasis on science and social studies, engage students in learning about the place they live and how we depend on natural systems to sustain us. Students learn to value diverse perspectives about different landscapes whether it is a city sidewalk, an urban forest, or a community park.
Sensational Trees: This downloadable resource for educators of students grades K-2 that invites young learners to investigate trees using their senses.
Biodiversity Blitz Trees: This downloadable resource for educators of students in grades 6-8 that invites young learners to investigate the variety of species in an ecosystem, and how this variety - or biodiversity - helps sustain life on Earth.

Secondary Education

Several secondary modules are available, each requiring a minimum of a two-hour workshop. These modules address various environmental issues relevant to communities.

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Community Connections: Investigating Our Place: This module helps students discover their own backyards and work as community members to protect the environmental, social, and economic integrity of the places we live.
Municipal Solid Waste: Students explore the roots and solutions of this universal environmental issue.
Air, Water, and Waste: Examining Connections: Students learn how to assess environment and health issues, and about the tools they can use to make good decisions.
Ecosystem Services: This unit, designed for middle and high school students, includes three hands-on activities that engage students in discovering and analyzing the many ecosystem services that trees provide. It also utilizes tools, such as i-Tree Design from the US Forest Service, to calculate the dollar value of the benefits provided by a tree or a set of trees.

GreenSchools Program

The GreenSchools program features five hands-on, student-driven investigations at its core. These units can be purchased or accessed through online courses at www.plt.org. The GreenSchools! program combines PLT lessons, service-learning, and leadership opportunities for students to help turn their school into a model green school. They investigate their school's operations in five areas (energy use, waste and recycling, water consumption, school site, and environmental quality) and then make recommendations or take action to reduce their school's ecological footprint.

Green Career Pathways

PLT also focuses on helping youth discover careers in sustainable forestry and conservation.

Green Jobs: Exploring Forest Careers: This includes four hands-on instructional activities to help youth research forestry jobs, and practice managing and monitoring forest resources. It is designed for educators, career and guidance counselors, Scouts, 4-H, and FFA leaders, foresters, and job training advisors to use with learners aged 12-25.
My Green Job Quiz: This interactive online quiz helps youth match their personality with an array of green job opportunities.

Professional Development and Resources

PLT provides high-quality professional development opportunities for educators. Each year, 15,000 educators participate in PLT workshops, bringing the program to an additional 3 million students. Workshop participants include formal and nonformal educators, and anyone interested in teaching children about the natural world. PLT offers both online courses and in-person workshops tailored for specific grade levels and education standards, environmental topics, and formal and nonformal teaching situations. Educators learn new teaching skills and become comfortable teaching outdoors.

PLT correlates its curricula to state and national standards, which allows educators to meet educational goals easily by using PLT activities in the classroom.

GreenWorks! Program

The GreenWorks! program began in 1993 and provides grants of up to $1,000 for service learning projects conducted by students in schools or youth groups. To date, PLT has helped fund close to 1,000 environmental service-learning projects across the United States.

Impact and Evaluation

Studies have shown the positive impact of using the environment as an integrating concept in education. Students in schools where this approach is used perform better on standardized tests. A formal evaluation of PLT in 1994 found that it is an effective program for increasing environmental knowledge and effecting positive attitudinal growth in students in grades PreK-8, particularly in Grades 2-8. Teachers who have completed at least one PLT Teacher Workshop and implement the activities as intended are more likely to observe knowledge gains and attitudinal change in their students.

Project Learning Tree in South Carolina

In South Carolina, Project Learning Tree is jointly sponsored by the SC Forestry Commission, the Forestry Association of South Carolina, and the SC Department of Education.

SC PLT Environmental Education Centers increase opportunities for PLT professional development events and outreach to impact a larger number of diverse communities. Free educational kits are available at the centers to help increase educators’ implementation of PLT. South Carolina has five PLT Environmental Education Centers located across the state.

The SC PLT Jerry L. Shrum Leadership in Education Award recognizes individuals or organizations who have made positive contributions to advance PLT programs and initiatives at the state or regional level.

A Legacy of Environmental Education

Project Learning Tree operates from a national office at the headquarters of the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) in Washington, DC. Program delivery to school districts, nonformal learning programs, preservice teacher-training, and other outlets take place on the state level. Each state has one or more state PLT coordinators.

SFI became Project Learning Tree’s new home in 2017 because of SFI’s commitment to educating and engaging the next generation of environmental stewards. Project Learning Tree has reached 140 million diverse young people across the United States through 775,000 committed and dedicated educators and community leaders over the last 40 years.

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