What You Actually Get When You Buy This Resource
Teacher Created Resources produces a curriculum titled Going Green for grades 1 and 2, and it comes as either a printable PDF download or a spiral-bound kit depending on which version you order. The content covers basic environmental concepts — recycling, saving water, reducing waste, understanding plants and animals, and simple sustainability habits appropriate for young children. It is not a complete science curriculum on its own. You will use it as a supplement to whatever core program your school already requires. The package typically contains 48 to 64 pages of activities, reading passages, worksheets, and a few hands-on projects. The activities are organized into units like Water Conservation, Recycling and Reusing, Plants and Animals, and Reduce Reuse Recycle. Each unit has reading material at a first- to second-grade comprehension level followed by matching exercises, short-answer questions, coloring pages, and cut-and-paste worksheets. There are also teacher notes with discussion prompts embedded throughout.
Going Green Grd 1 2 Going Green Teacher Created Resources
The digital download version includes everything you need to print at home or school. The physical kit adds a CD-ROM or access code for digital files plus the printed book itself. If you already have a laminator and a printer, the digital copy is sufficient. If you do not, ordering the physical kit saves you the effort of sourcing those tools separately. I used this resource during a two-week spring unit on Earth Day. The children were seven and eight years old. Most of them had never separated recyclables from trash at home, so the recycling sorting activities turned out to be more foundational than I expected. The reading passages worked fine for my higher-level readers, but several of my lower-level students struggled with the vocabulary words like ecosystem, habitat, and conservation. I had to pre-teach those terms separately before assigning the worksheets. The hands-on project where students created a poster about saving water was the most successful activity. The children engaged with it for almost the entire period. The cut-and-paste recycling sorting sheet was the least engaging. It felt repetitive after the third copy, and the instructions were unclear about which trash items were actually recyclable in our local program. I ended up correcting the sheet myself rather than letting the children work from it directly.
One specific problem I encountered involved the answer key. The downloaded answer key had misprinted answers on two of the worksheets. Page 34 listed the correct water conservation steps in the wrong order, and page 41 had the animal habitat matching answers switched. I caught this after printing the first batch. My workaround was to pull the original unprinted PDF file, locate the error, manually correct it in Adobe Reader, and re-print only those pages. If you order this resource, do not print all 64 pages at once. Print one unit at a time and verify the answer key against the questions before committing to a full run.
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Counter-Intuitive Things Beginners Miss
Most teachers assume that Because the themes are environmental, this book will connect naturally to science standards. That assumption is partially wrong. The Going Green material aligns loosely with Next Generation Science Standards for K-2, but the alignment is thin. It touches on ESS1, ESS2, and LS2, but it does not systematically cover the performance expectations. If your district requires documented NGSS alignment for every lesson plan, this resource will not satisfy an auditor on its own. You will need to map the activities to specific standards yourself. Another thing that surprises people is how quickly the coloring-pages-style worksheets lose educational value. Young children will color any worksheet if you hand it to them. That does not mean they are learning the content. I learned to separate the coloring activities from the actual comprehension work. I gave the coloring pages only after the children had completed the matching and short-answer sections, and even then I used them as a quiet independent activity rather than a primary learning tool.
Practical Usage Notes
The reading passages are designed for independent reading at a 1.0 to 1.9 grade level. Your below-level readers will need support. Scaffolding is necessary. Read the passage aloud first, then have the children read along. Without that step, many of your lowest readers will skip the passages entirely and move straight to the pictures. The worksheets are single-topic focused. Each sheet covers one concept like recycling paper, reusing containers, or saving water. This is both a strength and a weakness. It makes differentiation easy because you can assign individual sheets to different groups. But it also means you will need additional materials if you want a broader unit. This book alone will not sustain a full month of Earth Day lessons. It will get you through approximately ten to twelve instructional days if you use every page. There is no parent communication piece included. Some similar curricula from other publishers include a take-home letter or a family activity guide. This one does not. If you want parents involved in the conservation theme, you will need to write that communication yourself.
Limitations You Should Know About
The content is dated in places. References to plastic bag bans and local recycling rules reflect the mid-2010s. Some municipalities have moved past those specific policies. If you are teaching in an area where local regulations have changed significantly, you will need to update certain examples before sharing them with students. The digital format uses older PDF standards. Some of the hyperlinks within the downloadable version do not function correctly when opened in newer browsers. This is a minor inconvenience but worth noting if you plan to share the files directly with students on tablets. The content itself is readable, but navigation through the PDF is clunky. For districts that require materials to meet accessibility standards like Section 508 compliance, this resource does not appear to have been designed with screen-reader compatibility in mind. The text is embedded in images on some pages rather than as selectable text. If accessibility is a concern for your school, test the files thoroughly before purchasing in bulk.
If you need a more comprehensive environmental science unit with stronger standards alignment and updated content, you might consider supplementing this with a program from a publisher like Scholastic or National Geographic Learning. Those products tend to have more rigorous standards mapping and more recent information. Teacher Created Resources does a reasonable job at the price point, but it is not the most detailed option available for this topic.
Where to Find It
You can purchase Going Green Grd 1 2 Going Green Teacher Created Resources through the publisher's website at teachercreated.com, through major educational supply retailers like Scholastic Teaching Stores or Amazon, and through school district purchasing portals. The digital download typically costs between $8 and $12. The physical kit runs around $18 to $25 depending on whether it includes the CD-ROM version. Pricing varies by seller and by volume discounts offered to schools. The download link for the digital version is provided on the product page after purchase. It is usually a PDF file roughly 15 to 20 megabytes in size. Make sure your school's IT department allows downloads from educational publishers before placing an order, as some district firewalls block .pdf downloads from third-party sites.
Final Practical Recommendation
Buy it if you need a low-cost, ready-to-use supplement for an environmental awareness unit in grades 1 or 2. Do not buy it if you expect it to serve as a standalone science curriculum or if you require robust NGSS alignment documentation. Use the reading passages with scaffolding for your lower-level readers. Verify the answer key before printing. Update any outdated local references yourself. And keep your expectations realistic about what a $10 supplement can accomplish in a classroom setting.
