At-Home Educational Activities

Educational Activities You Can Do At Home

Are you looking for fun educational activities for your family to do at home? Parks and Gardens staff has compiled the list below of activities and free online educational resources for all ages. Additional resources will be added as they become available, so check back periodically.

Environmental Education YouTube Channel

Our Environmental Educators have been hard at work bringing you new content such as educational videos and family friendly activities that you can do right in your own backyard. Check out the Environmental Education YouTube channel to begin exploring today!

Activities

Celebrate Earth Day by Nature Journaling

  • Nature journaling is simply recording your experiences in nature any way you see fit. It can help develop your art, language arts, and scientific observation skills. It's also a fun and relaxing activity for anyone of any age!

Join the City Nature Challenge- April 24 to 27

  • The City Nature Challenge is a worldwide bioblitz to find and document as many species of wildlife and plants as possible over a four-day period from April 24 to 27. The challenge involves taking pictures of nature and uploading them to the free iNaturalist app. This activity can be done in your backyard, private property, or in the community while adhering to social distancing guidelines. 

How to Fold Paper Pots

  • Ready to plant some seeds, but don't have any pots? No problem! Grab some paper and start folding with us! Learn how to make compostable paper pots at home and learn more about the flowering plant life cycle.

River Avengers

  • Watch this video as four friends discover how trash from their playground can cause harm to plants and animals in the river running through their town. What do you think might be causing the problems in the video to happen? Think of ways that you can help to stop these problems and help keep our river clean and healthy.

Backyard Adventures featuring Pill Bugs

  • Ever wonder what's living in your backyard? Check out this video to learn about backyard habitats and a little creature called a Pill Bug. Then try your hand at setting up a simple experiment to learn about the scientific method.

Reuse and Recycle at Home

  • How do you dispose of waste and other unwanted items? Improving the way you dispose of waste is an important way you can help our environment. Reducing waste, reusing items, recycling, and composting save natural resources, energy, and landfill space. Use this chart to analyze how you currently dispose of waste and whether items being thrown away could be reused, recycled, or composted. Then talk as a family about how you can make improvements.

Guess Who? - Animal Adaptations Part 1

  • Check out this video from Sara, Airlie Gardens Environmental Educator, for a little game of Guess Who! Learn about the adaptations you find in animals just by looking at their skull. You can learn a lot about what they eat and how they see, smell and hear!

All About Birds

  • It's a great time to get out and enjoy your own backyard and see what's flying around! eBird is an excellent resource for birders of all ages. It lets you know what birds are in our area throughout the year and lets you keep track of what you see! You can start a list for your yard and see how it changes throughout the year! Look at a tutorial to get you started, or check out some really fun bingo cards to help you start exploring!

Learn to Compost

  • Compost is organic material that can be added to soil to help plants grow. Food scraps and yard waste together currently make up more than 28% of what we throw away, and should be composted instead. Making compost keeps these materials out of landfills where they take up space and release methane, a potent greenhouse gas. In this activity you will learn composting basics, the benefits of composting, and how to compost at home.

All About Feathers

  • What makes birds unique? You may think of beaks, feathers, wings, laying eggs, or walking on two legs. All of these are important elements of bird anatomy, but only one of them sets birds apart from all other living creatures. Explore the fascinating science behind feathers in this interactive tutorial "All About Feathers" from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Bird Academy.

How to Make a Toad Abode

  • Watch this video to learn how to make your yard even friendlier to our amphibian populations by making a toad abode! Now go outside and listen for amphibians calling in the spring and see how many you can hear! Visit these links to learn all about the calls of our local amphibians and how you can help with their conservation.

Test Your Pollinator Knowledge

  • How well do you know your pollinators and the valuable services they provide to our ecosystem? Test your knowledge by taking this pollinator quiz!

Pollinator Backyard Activity Guide

  • Look for a patch of flowers and watch closely to see what sort of animals visit them. Then, follow the activities on your worksheet to record your observations, monitor what types of pollinators you see, and help attract more pollinators.

The Power of Pollination- Protecting the Honeybee

  • Honeybees' role in the pollination process makes them vital to the food supply. In this lesson, you will learn about the importance of saving the valuable honeybee population, which is on the decline in some areas due to parasites, Varroa mites, and pesticides.

Trees for Many Reasons

Water Quality

  • All living things need water, so it is important to keep natural water sources like rivers, lakes, and oceans clean of pollution. Use this activity guide from our friends at NEEF (National Environmental Education Foundation) to learn more and explore the topic of water quality.

Hidden Worlds of our National Parks

Ways of Watersheds

  • Complete this online lesson from UNC-TV Science. This interactive lesson will teach you all about water, the water cycle, and watersheds. When you finish the lesson, brainstorm some ways we can protect our watersheds and the land and water that surround them.

Bird Song Hero

  • Play The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's "Bird Song Hero" game. Do you recognize any of the birds in the game? Now go outside and see how many different bird songs you can hear and identify in your backyard.

Sights & Sounds of Nature

  • Check out the sights and sounds of Yellowstone National Park in this cool video from PBS.org! Now go outside your home and look and listen carefully. What do you see? What do you hear? Keep a record of the sights and sounds at different times of day around your home while you're out of school.

Backyard Scavenger Hunt

  • Check out this Backyard Scavenger Hunt! Activities like these can be done in your own backyard or around the neighborhood. If you do choose to go to a park or other public facility, please be sure to follow the guidelines of social distancing- remain at least six feet from others, and don't congregate in groups of more than ten.

Online Educational Resources

Airlie Gardens Environmental Education YouTube Channel

4-H Inspire Kids to Do Activity Guide

Cornell Lab of Ornithology Bird Academy

ecoEXPLORE

  • ecoEXPLORE is an incentive-based citizen science program for children in grades K-8. Developed by The North Carolina Arboretum, this innovative pilot program combines science exploration with kid-friendly technology to foster a fun learning environment for children while encouraging them to explore the outdoors and participate in citizen science.

eek! Environmental Education for Kids

National Weather Service Educational Resources

NEEF- Environmental Education at Home

Pollinator Partnership

Project Learning Tree- Activities to do with Children at Home

  • Avoid going stir-crazy during self-quarantines with these simple family activities; they're the perfect way to keep kids engaged through active participation as they learn about nature, and suggest ways we can lessen our environmental footprint at home and beyond. 

UNC-TV Interactive Lessons

  • These are very robust, highly-interactive lessons, complete with opportunities for note-taking, multiple choice online quizzes and a final project, that a student can do with a parent/teacher or on his/her/their own, and they can take 1 to 3 50-minute class periods to complete. Click here to access the site.