Resources for Students

About Service Learning | Environmental Issues | Start A Cool Club | Win Awesome Stuff

About Service Learning

What Is Service Learning?
Service learning is a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities.
Why should I do it? Students in the Seattle School District are required to complete 60 service learning hours in order to graduate. Service learning also is a great opportunity to make a difference doing something you're interested in! You might even find something you want to do for the rest of your life.
Click here for the form you need to fill out for service learning!
Corporation for National and Community Service
Links to many national and community service opportunities, including AmeriCorps. This site offers ways you can help, as well as ways they can help you.
National Service-Learning Clearinghouse
Service-Learning Resources
The Learn and Serve America National Service-Learning Clearinghouse (NSLC) supports the service-learning community in higher education, kindergarten through grade twelve, community-based initiatives and tribal programs, as well as all others interested in strengthening schools and communities using service-learning techniques and methodologies.

Environmental Issues

Ecological Footprint Quiz
Find out how many resources you use and what you can do to cut back on your ecological consumption. This quiz will tell you how many planet Earths you will need to sustain your everyday needs!
If everyone in the world lived like the average American, we would need over five Earths to support the entire human population!
High School Environmental Center
United States Environmental Protection Agency
This site has information about environmental issues and and ways you can help protect the environment. In addition, you will find links to jobs, internships, scholarships, awards, competitions, and community service projects.
It’s Getting Hot In Here
Online Youth Environmental Forum
It's Getting Hot In Here is a community media project created and sustained by leaders of the youth climate movement as a place to speak out about an issue that threatens our livelihoods and future generations and the actions that we are taking to create a more just and sustainable future.

Start A Cool Club

Be A PeaceJam Ambassador!
Start one at your school! Conferences are held twice a year at Oregon State University.
PeaceJam is a year-long international educational program that gives high school-aged youth worldwide an opportunity to study and have direct contact with Nobel Peace Prize Laureates. Its goal is to foster a new generation of peacemakers, greater interest in global education, and local peace projects in schools and communities. PeaceJam is the only organization in the world that has twelve Nobel Peace Laureates working together, long-term for a common cause - our youth.

Win Awesome Stuff

Get Published in Teen Ink
Hybrid cars? Organic food? Solar and wind energy? Pay-as-you-throw trash programs? Required recycling? If you have a plan to save the world, we sure do want to hear about it. And if you know a lot about a current problem facing the planet - pollution, overpopulation, natural resource consumption/destruction - whip out your green pen and share your idea to solve an environmental problem or describe a solution. Each June at least one teen will be honored for the best environment article published in Teen Ink, winners receive prizes and schwag from Teen Ink. More details Here!.
Deadline: Entries are accepted all year, winners are selected each June.
How would you Power Your Future?
Students’ answers to that question could win them and your school thousands of dollars in rewards in a competition called Imagine Tomorrow. Exclusively for high school students, the competition debuts May 9-11, 2008. This competition will demonstrate to our future leaders the importance of civic engagement, while underscoring the intrinsic power of their own ideas and actions.
Under the advisement of a school mentor, student teams will present their best ideas to address the world’s growing energy problems. Whether their strongest subjects are science, social studies, business, engineering, or the arts, there is a challenge category for them. Students may choose to tackle the challenges from one aspect, or bring together a range of ideas to offer their solution in a multi-disciplinary format. The range of solutions is limited only by their imaginations.
Student teams and their advisor will travel to the Washington State University campus in Pullman where they’ll be fully hosted and given the opportunity to tour research labs. They will present their project before a panel of judges that includes top University faculty, as well as business and opinion leaders from throughout the state. Students and advisors will join the distinguished judges and fellow competitors at a spectacular awards banquet. Highlighting the evening will be a keynote speech from a man named one of Time magazine's "Heroes of the Planet:" Mr. Denis Hayes, board chair of the International Earth Day Network, President of the Bullitt Foundation, and former director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Take the next step. Imagine Tomorrow. We have made a flier available to download from the Web site. Please post the flier in your classroom.