An Educator’s Back to School List

by John Windau, Wildlife Communications Specialist

It is time for educators to begin thinking about this year’s lessons. The Division of Wildlife has many resources available to educators including professional development, loaner equipment and educational materials. Most of these resources are offered to educators free of charge. 

You may be interested to learn more about the Division of Wildlife’s professional development opportunities for educators from preschool through high school. These programs offer project-based learning programs that fit Ohio's New Science Learning Standards. And most are free or very low cost! 

For K-12, we offer training in the Project WILD and Aquatic Project WILD programs. Project WILD is a supplementary education program emphasizing awareness, appreciation and understanding of wildlife and natural resources, while helping students learn more about science, ELA, math, and more.

Realizing that early childhood educators are also looking for ways to incorporate wildlife into their classrooms, Growing Up WILD is the newest offering from Project WILD. Most instructors are also Step-Up to Quality approved.

All of these programs are referenced in the new Model Curriculum as high quality Instructional Strategies and Resources throughout most grade levels in Science. They are fun, easy to use, and don’t require any extra time or materials to implement. All can be received through a professional development workshop for 3-6 contact hours. You can find a listing of upcoming workshops on our website.  Just scroll to the bottom of the page.

WILD School Sites is another program you may be interested in. This program is an action extension of Project WILD and can involve any school property as a place to learn about and benefit from wildlife and the environment. WILD School Sites allow teachers and students to take what they learn from Project WILD and apply it to the creation of wildlife habitat on their school grounds. They can then use those habitat improvement projects to help bring real life lessons in science, language arts, math, and visual arts into their curriculum. These types of project or performance-based activities are very important in today’s standards. For more information about these programs, please visit the Conservation Education page. 

Materials from the Wildlife History Timeline
 Loaner Trunk

A wide variety of loaner materials are available to educators from the Division of Wildlife. Travelling trunks are a great way to bring wildlife education into classrooms using hands-on learning activities and visual aids. These rolling suitcases can be borrowed for two weeks at a time. Most trunks contain activity guides to help educators who are less familiar with Ohio wildlife to structure their lessons.

The Division of Wildlife also produces a wide variety of educational materials and resources, including posters, an eNewsletter for educators, life history sets, 12 different field guides of Ohio’s wildlife, and a Wild Ohio Magazine for kids. 

Again, most of these items are provided free to educators by the Division of Wildlife. You can find our Education Materials Brochure online. Or contact the Education Coordinator or your local Communication Specialist to find out more about these resources.