Energy After the Feast: Holiday Activity – Teacher

Summary

The Energy After the Feast Teacher Guide provides a clear framework for leading a hands-on lesson about waste, energy, and sustainability. Teachers guide students through sorting holiday meal items into four Energy Pathways: Compost/Biogas, Recycling, Food Donation, and Landfill, while explaining how each system conserves or recovers energy.

The guide includes detailed procedures, discussion prompts, and data-based activities that teach students about embedded energy, recovery potential, and local waste systems. It also contains a quantitative reasoning section where students compare the energy savings of materials like aluminum, PET plastic, and paper.

Teachers receive reflection questions, answer keys, and optional extension ideas such as a Claim-Evidence-Reasoning (CER) debate on whether it is better to conserve or recover energy.

This guide supports middle and high school science classrooms with cross-curricular integration of environmental science, math, and social studies.