A Year of Ecoliteracy Opportunities: 12 Classroom Activities for Multilingual Learners (Part 1)

Happy December!

In Part 1 of my final blog for this year, I am offering a monthly look at environmental days you can celebrate with your students throughout 2025. There are several environmental recognition days each month, so feel free to choose any of these observances, but here I have selected one for each month (January through June), with a suggestion for at least one accompanying activity with a language focus. (Read Part 2 here!) The important point is to learn about the environment and to promote language development in whatever ways and through whatever content is most relevant and appropriate for your multilingual learners of English (MLEs).

Opening Bonus Activity! Writing Eco-Resolutions

In December, have your students get ready for the new year by making Green New Year’s Resolutions: Have each student write a letter to themselves with at least one green change they really want to make and maintain, and be sure to model by sharing one of your own. You can do a whole class brainstorming of possibilities prior to the letter writing. Here are some great example sentences to help students get started:

• • “I resolve to bike or walk rather than drive when possible.”
  • “I will buy cleaning and other products that do less harm to the environment and to me if I am putting them directly on my body.”
  • “I will bring my own bag(s) with me when I shop.” (One of the best gifts I ever received was an inexpensive bag that folded up small and I could carry in my purse, which meant I always had a bag with me. It has saved hundreds of wasted bags over the years, and I’ve carried it for about 15 years.)

This activity is also an opportunity to practice the language and formatting for writing a personal letter, such as date, salutation, and closing. My own MLEs have very much enjoyed receiving their emailed letters, with an additional goal included about how they wanted to continue their language development when they completed their English program.

January: International Environmental Education Day (26 Jan)

Do a class informational fair for environmental education day. Each student chooses one environmental issue and teaches about it to all others by carrying out independent research and creating an infographic with key words or text on some topic of interest, using whatever materials, computer programs, or images are available. As an example, this is one of my favorite ecoliteracy infographics, contrasting egocentrism with ecocentrism:

Here are some great topics to get students started:

• • global warming (what it is and the evidence of it)
  • COP [Conference of Parties] conferences, which are the annual United Nations Climate Change Conferences (who sponsors them and what is accomplished at them)
  • the important role of Earth’s ice caps for reflecting back heat from the sun
  • biodiversity loss
  • endangered species
  • air pollution/air quality
  • why coral reefs matter and coral bleaching
  • overfishing
  • the role of forests in our ecosystems and/or deforestation

Focus on Language > Creating these infographics provide opportunities for content-area reading as well as skills development in conceptualizing big ideas using visual literacy, defining, explaining cause and effect, and summarizing. The infographics can also be done very simply using poster paper and presented as a symposium where each student presents, or as a gallery walk where students rotate through presentations and give feedback. The infographics can also be posted around the school as ecoliteracy teaching tools or as cross-age presentations to younger students.

February: World Wetlands Day (2 Feb)

The objective of this month’s ecoliteracy study is for students to understand the benefits of wetlands, where you might begin by showing students images of various wetlands and then asking students to agree or disagree with the statement “Wetlands are wasted land that should be drained and used for other purposes.”

Here is a short reading you might use to teach this lesson, where students come to understand why the above statement is false. Students can work in pairs or small groups, with each reading and possibly further researching about their assigned wetland benefit and summarizing those benefits for the class.

Focus on Language > This is also a good reading to use to create a matching activity to highlight language functions using the functional verbs and their respective wetlands benefits, for example:

• • • improve water quality
    • provide wildlife habitat
    • maintain ecosystem productivity
    • reduce coastal storm damage

March: Earth Hour (Last Saturday)

Earth Hour is a part of an environmental campaign to bring awareness to the negative effects of climate change by asking people to turn off all lights at homes, schools, and businesses for an hour at 8:30 pm (20:30), local time, usually on the last Saturday of March, which in 2025 is 29 March. I like this observance because it can be honored not just by students and schools, but within families and entire communities. You can also use this to discuss turning off lights when not in use as a habit for those not already doing so and to consider the power of the sun as a source of light and of renewable energy. You may even want to build a class DIY solar oven using a pizza box. This is also a good transition into the 2025 Earth Day theme of renewable energy.

Focus on Language > Earth Hour is an excellent venue for language study—root words, compound words, and expressions related to the words sun (e.g., sunbelt, sunbeam, sunbathing, “one’s place in the sun,” the “sun never sets on ____,” “under the sun”),  solar (e.g., solar power/cell/panel, solar system, solar plexus), and sunlight, where for the latter, the root “photo,” meaning light, offers numerous opportunities for language development.

April: Earth Day (22 Apr)

The 2024 Earth Day theme is Planet vs. Plastics, which I wrote about in my April blog. Plastics continue to be a major health and pollution problem for people and the planet, where less than 10% of all plastics are recycled and life forms of all types continue to ingest micro and other plastics unwittingly. The focus of Earth Day 2025 is on support for tripling renewable energy by 2030 by promoting solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, and tidal generated energy.

Here you can find fact sheets, quizzes, articles, and other resources to learn and teach about renewable energy, including this interview of two environmental youth activists in Denver, Colorado in the United States.

Focus on Language > After studying the interview, students can take turns role-playing the interviewer and the activist. Amelia, one of the high school activists, explains that it was learning about the Keeling Curve four years earlier, that motivated her to want to do something about climate change. A key content and language objective could be to understand the term Keeling Curve and how this is related to sustaining life on the planet. These suggested activities serve to promote reading, speaking, and listening skills, as well as ecoliteracy content learning and academic language development.

Additional Earth Day resources and year round teaching ideas can be found here.

May: Learn About Composting Day (29 May)

Composting is the natural process of recycling organic matter into soil. Here, you and your students can read about the top three benefits of composting and what can and cannot be composted. This MLE appropriate activity allows students to understand the motto “If it grows, it goes” into compost. You may consider visiting a composting site through your city, a local business or farm, or even starting a composting bin with your students.

Focus on Language >  In a recent blog, my coauthor and I discuss (vermi)composting—what it is, how it is linked to teaching about the importance of healthy soil, food awareness, and waste, and how it is a powerful form of recycling. Check out the blog for lots of classroom activities to connect food and earth study.  

June: National Upcycling Day (24 Jun)

Upcycling is repurposing and giving new life to old items, such that they are not discarded. For example, this could be turning old t-shirts into bags or using empty containers as planters for succulents, lettuces, or flowers. In an earlier blog, I wrote about how in Bali, students turned plastic trash into chairs for their school.

Focus on Language > At the beginning of the month, study these project examples and brainstorm others, then allow students to choose an upcycling project to present to the class or even the larger community on 24 June. This project presents a perfect opportunity to teach the language of process, where there is a focus on steps. Require students to enumerate the steps in their own chosen upcycling project.

I hope these ideas inspire you to start weaving ecoliteracy into your classroom activities for the new year! Stay tuned for the second part of this series, where I’ll share six more months of engaging environmental days and activities to support your multilingual learners of English.