🌍 AP Environmental Science lesson plans
Free, standards-aligned high school AP Environmental Science lesson plans. Each one is a full, ready-to-teach plan with an objective, direct instruction, activities, and formative assessment. Make a free account to unlock the printable worksheet, slides, and unit test for any lesson.
HIPPO: Diagnosing Human Impacts on Biodiversity
Students will use the HIPPO framework to identify and rank the human-caused drivers of biodiversity loss acting on a specific ecosystem, connect those drivers to losses of ecosyst…
Read the full lesson →Pollution and Human Health: Lead, Mercury, and the Dose Makes the Poison
Students will trace exposure pathways for heavy-metal pollutants from source to human body and analyze epidemiological data to link chronic and acute exposures to specific health…
Read the full lesson →Endocrine Disruptors: Low-Dose Chemicals, Big Biological Effects
Students will explain the mechanism by which endocrine disruptors interfere with hormone signaling, analyze dose-response data from Tyrone Hayes's atrazine-and-Xenopus laevis stud…
Read the full lesson →Energy Conservation, Efficiency, and Cogeneration
Students will distinguish energy conservation from energy efficiency, quantify energy and cost savings from efficiency upgrades and cogeneration, and justify a specific conservati…
Read the full lesson →Global Energy Consumption: Per-Capita Demand and the Developed–Developing Divide
Students will interpret per-capita energy consumption data, convert between kWh, joules, and BTU, and explain quantitatively why energy demand differs between developed and develo…
Read the full lesson →Impacts of Mining: Methods, Acid Mine Drainage, and the Limits of Reclamation
Students will distinguish surface and subsurface mining methods by their landscape impacts, explain the chemistry of acid mine drainage from sulfide oxidation, and evaluate the ef…
Read the full lesson →Solar Radiation, Axial Tilt, and Earth's Seasons
Students will explain how the angle of incoming solar radiation (insolation) varies with latitude and season due to Earth's 23.5° axial tilt, and will use flashlight-and-graph-pap…
Read the full lesson →Exponential vs. Logistic Growth: Doubling Time and the Rule of 70
Students will differentiate exponential (J-curve) from logistic (S-curve) population growth, compute percent growth rate from birth, death, immigration, and emigration data, and a…
Read the full lesson →Introduction to Biodiversity: Scales, Evenness, and Resilience
Students will distinguish genetic, species, and ecosystem diversity; calculate and interpret Simpson's diversity index for two communities differing in richness and evenness; and…
Read the full lesson →Introduction to Ecosystems: Boundaries, Factors, and Interactions
Students will define an ecosystem as a bounded system of biotic and abiotic factors, place organisms within the correct level of ecological organization, and classify species inte…
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