The No Impact Project: Tips and Lesson Plans for Students, Parents and Teachers

The No Impact Project, which is accompanied with a book, film and blog, is a non-profit project aimed to educate our society about the environment and promote behavioural change.

In addition to proving itself a useful resource for students and parents that would like tips on how to pursue a more sustainable lifestyle, it also includes five 50-minute lesson plans for students from Grade 6-12. These educational tools, which can be used individually or together, provide engaging and thoughtful activities on the topics of: consumption, energy, food, transportation and water. Read more for a description of each of these lesson plans.

Consumption: This lesson plan examines how advertising affects our consumption habits and what we can do to get what we need, while doing less harm to the environment.

Energy: Here we look at the current system that supplies energy to our communities and it investigates alternative energy sources and actions we can take to reduce our daily energy consumption.

Food: We examine how food choices affect the environment and our quality of life. It includes exercises that asses the students past meals and develop strategies for decreasing food-related trash.

Transportation: Here we examine how street design could encourage students to use more active forms of transportation, such as walking or biking.

Water: This lesson plan looks at ways to conserve water, the differences between bottled and tap water and actions on how to minimize the amount of chemicals that are dumped into our drains.