Keep Austin Beautiful is excited to offer you another amazing year of our hands-on, TEKS-aligned youth environmental education programming, FREE of charge, for this coming school year! Registration for our Clean Creek Campus and Generation Zero programs is NOW OPEN for all interested teachers!
Clean Creek Campus
Clean Creek Campus is hands-on, science-based programming designed for 3rd-8th grade students. Our educators connect classroom learning with on-the-ground service projects that focus on protecting water quality. Participating schools receive two in-class presentations, followed by a service project at a local green space. During this half-day service-learning field trip, students rotate through stations emphasizing creek restoration and clean water quality. Stations may include litter cleanup, making seedballs, macroinvertebrate investigation, native vs invasive plant exploration, and a scavenger hunt.
All Clean Creek Campus program supplies and materials are provided by Keep Austin Beautiful and our partner, Watershed Protection Department, including the cost of transportation for service project days as needed.
Generation Zero
Generation Zero is an in-class youth environmental education program in partnership with Austin Resource Recovery. Our educators engage K-12 students in fun, hands-on activities which raise awareness about recycling, composting, and conservation while giving students simple solutions for reducing their waste. The Generation Zero model includes three Keep Austin Beautiful-led activities, which incorporate a service learning component.
The curriculum is divided into grade levels – K-2nd, 3rd-5th, 6th-8th and 9th-12th – with a different focus for each.
- K-2nd: Compost Systems – concentrates on hands-on sorting and classifying objects that teaches students about where trash goes and culminates with building a worm bin for your class to keep.
- 3rd-5th:Recycling Home Habits – emphasis on math with hands-on manipulations that teaches students about the composition of trash and recycling beyond the basics.
- 6th-8th and 9th-12th: Auditing Our Impact – explores the type of waste produced at the school by doing an audit of its waste stream, followed by a student-led project addressing waste concerns at the school.
