LitteratiED Lesson Plans
Free STEM based lesson plans to bring engaging, practical, and eco-friendly content to your curriculum.
These active, tech enabled lessons help students learn more about their local environment & possibly even make a lasting impact from the results of their work
Browse LitteratiED Content:
One Day Lesson Plans
Fast Food
Discover how much litter gets created by the fast food packaging that people buy each day in your local town.
Challenges students to come up with solutions for reducing waste created by packaging from popular fast food restaurants.
What Is Litter?
Use Litterati to clean an area of your community.
After the cleanup, use the app's tagging function to help students learn the different categories of litter & the difference between litter vs. waste.
Returnable Litter's Impact
Does your town, state, or country incentivize returning certain types of litter?
Use this lesson plan to have students discover the impact these incentives can have on the overall litter in the community.
Challenges
A core function of the Litterati app is creating, sharing, & participating in Challenges.
Bring Challenges into your classroom(s) and encourage environmentally friendly competition amongst students, grade levels, families, or entire schools!
Creative Writing
Every piece of litter has a story. It was manufactured, shipped, stocked, sold, & consumed in some way before it ended up on the ground.
Let students combine data with creativity to tell the story of local litter they found & cleaned up.
Recycling
We often default to think of litter simply as trash....but we don't think about how much of the litter we see could be recycled.
In this lesson, students will analyze how much of the litter they see can be recycled.
Circular Economy
We largely live in a "linear economy" where things are used once and then disposed of.
A circular economy can maximize the value and usage of the materials we create while minimizing waste.
Product Design + Packaging
This lesson promotes thinking about how products and packaging can be redesigned to inherently create less waste.
Promotes proactive ideas.
Planned Obsolescence
Businesses are largely incentivized to convince people to buy the latest model of their products. Even if the one they already have still works.
Let's look at how to promote sustainable consumption
One Week Lesson Plans
How Litter Returns
Litter doesn't just appear. It comes from somewhere.
Use this lesson plan to help students come up with & test hypotheses for where local litter is really coming from.
Recycling At Home
Many things thrown away in our homes & in our neighborhoods could actually be recycled.
What would the environmental impact be if we recycled everything that we could?
The Home Work
How does litter differ between the different neighborhoods your students live in?
In this lesson, students will discover how their neighborhood compares to other local neighborhoods for the amount & types of litter that exists in them.
Full Unit or Full Year Lesson Plans
Making a Difference
All the world's litter & waste didn't just appear one day. And it won't be all cleaned in one day either.
This lesson unit is centered around thinking about how a consistent effort & demand for better stewardship can lead to real impact.
Redesigning a Cleaner World
By redesigning daily products, activities, and habits, we can reduce the negative impact we have on our world.
Build new mindsets about how we can better keep our schools, homes, communities, and world clean.
Coming Soon!
More Full Unit or Full Year lesson plans to be added. Check back soon!
For World Cleanup Day 2020, TED-Ed created a resource hub to feature some of their best environment focused educational content.
These resources are a great addition to any curriculum wanting to feature engaging content that share powerful actions students can take to make a difference in their world.
If you download the Litterati app, join TED-Ed's global challenge by using the code TEDED
LitteratiED FAQs
Are you in compliance with GDPR and COPPA?
Yes. All users begin as anonymous users & can choose to remain anonymous in order to keep an option that maximally protects their privacy, regardless of their age.
Here are our Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy, and Privacy Policy for Children for users who do create an account.
Do we Need to use the Litterati Dashboard + App to complete these lesson plans?
No. You can pieces of just about any lesson plan without using Litterati and a couple of them you can do entirely without Litterati.
Please use these lesson plans to whatever extent you would like (and to innovate on top of them to make them better!)
How to create your free Litterati account:
To enhance these lesson plans with the Litterati App + Web Dashboard, start by creating a free account in our app on the Google Play and iOS App Store.
You can do all of these lessons in a classroom with the free version of Litterati.
If you want to connect multiple classrooms, grade levels, schools, or districts together, or if you want to see our advanced features & data insights, see more information about Litterati Partnerships accounts here.
Want to bring Litterati to your classroom, school, or district?
Empower your students to create real, lasting change.
Download Litterati and create a free challenge for your students on the iOS and Android app stores.
And if you want to learn more about partnering with Litterati to engage your entire school, district, or city school system, fill out the form at the bottom of our Partnership Page: