Celebrating Earth Month

Welcome to Earth Month

Around the world, April 22nd is celebrated as Earth Day, but did you know that all of April is Earth Month? The first Earth Day was celebrated in the US on April 22,1970, to raise awareness and to promote political and civic action for a cleaner, healthier planet. [1]  By 1990 Earth Day activism had become an international event, with the month of April named Earth Month. [2]

In recognition of Earth Month, let’s take a look at ways for English language teachers to teach English with an environmental focus. You can find many resources on our EcoEnglish website. These resources are specifically for teaching English as a foreign or second language. In this post, we would like to highlight a special resource for April, the 2025 Earth Month Calendar.

A New Resource: The 2025 Earth Month Calendar

Subject to Climate provides an annual Earth Month Calendar. The 2025 Earth Month Calendar is an eBook of lesson ideas and plans formatted as a Google Slide presentation full of hyperlinks. Teachers can select a day of the month to access lesson plans and activities for different grades. Let’s see how this works, using the following screenshots as references.

2025 Earth Month Calendar [3]

April 5th focuses on eliminating single-use plastics. The teaching focus at the top of the page gives us some ideas, and the body of the slide provides links to lesson plans and free teaching materials.

                            Calendar Entry for April 5th

Let’s take a look at “A Million Bottles a Minute.” from Learning for a Sustainable Future.

Sample Lesson: "A Million Bottles a Minute"

My favorite activity on the webpage uses the “Plastics in my Day” worksheet. In a lesson focused on eliminating single-use plastics, students can draw or list plastics that they use every day and together come up with strategies to reduce their use. The activity can be modified depending on the students’ ages and English proficiency level. Beginners will be able to use numbers in a real world context. A teacher can provide sentence frames to help students prepare a pledge to use less plastic. 

Older students at intermediate or advanced levels of English proficiency might complete this version of the activity at the beginning of an project to raise awareness in their school or community to use alternatives to plastic whenever possible.

The Earth Month calendar can be easily copied to a user’s personal Google Drive or downloaded as a PDF or PowerPoint presentation with all links to resources intact. And, let’s not forget– Although April is Earth Month, we can make every day an Earth Day! These resources can be used all year long.

We would love to have feedback if you have used this calendar for any activities related to teaching. If you care to submit them, we would add them as supplemental materials in our blog post.

References

[1] The Origins of Earth Day from EarthDay.org

[2] Earth Day Campaigns and the History of the Holiday from Work.life/Workiva Carbon

[3] Icons on the Earth Month Calendar are from Flaticon