Activities to use with The Lorax

It is my personal opinion that whenever I teach students about environmental awareness, there is no other book or movie that better explains the message of taking care of the environment then Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax.

I’ve used the 1972 TV movie in a first grade classroom as part of an environmental awareness unit, and the children easily got the overall concepts of our dependency on the environment to make goods, and that also it is a finite resource if not taking care of properly.

Why am I boasting about the Lorax? Well the new 2012 version is coming to theaters this weekend!

I don’t know about you, but I am very excited to go see it.

If you are a teacher, troop leader, child care director, home school parent, or in any other educational position, then you should take advantage of this opportunity to let a relevant, pop culture recent event be the reason to explore a new topic in your lessons and activities!

As one of my former college professors always said “You gotta reach ‘em to teach ‘em”

And I don’t know about you, but I feel the media just handed us the topic of Environmental Education on a silver platter known as a blockbuster movie. When you can relate your lesson to something recent or pop culture, you've got the students attention.

If that’s not reason enough, Project Learning Tree has putout a list of their activities for grades preK-8 that tie in the book/movie and learning about trees. And if you don’t have the PLT handbook you can download them at their site!

If you already have the PLT activity guide, you may also find this list I made of activities related to Arbor Day helpful too.

You can easily find the Lorax book and 1972 movie at local libraries. I found a free version of the movie online for use in my classroom through Google.

If I were in a classroom right now, I would definitely be planning on starting my environmental science unit in the next couple of weeks while the children, and society, are still excited about the topic.

-Holly

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