The Environmental Science Intensive: A Free APES Series with Colorado School of Mines
Every session recording, slide deck, and practice resource, in one place.
AP Environmental Science asks a lot of you. One week you’re teaching geology, the next energy math, and it all builds toward one exam in May. This summer, we teamed up with the Colorado School of Mines to bring you the science and exam strategy side by side.
The Environmental Science Intensive was a free three-part webinar series built around the units that give APES teachers the most to juggle. Each session paired a subject matter expert (SME) from the School of Mines with an experienced APES teacher and AP reader. The SME brought the real earth and energy science behind the unit. The teacher connected it to what actually shows up on the exam, and resources to help students earn the points they tend to leave on the table.
We’ve pulled everything into one place here: session recordings, slide decks, practice resources, and resources to point students towards what’s next. Work through this page at your own pace, save what’s useful, and come back to it whenever you’re planning the units it covers. It’s built to be useful both in July or in the thick of April review.
About the partnership
Colorado School of Mines Professor of Geochemistry, Dr. Alexis Sitchler, whose research covers the interactions between water, rock, and carbon, taught all three sessions. She was joined in Webinar 1 by her postdoctoral fellow Collin Sutton. On the classroom side, Switch Classroom Teacher Advisory Council Member and AP reader Erika Erickson connected the science to the CED and the exam.
Session 1: Water Cycle and Earth Systems (Units 1.7 and 4)
The hydrologic cycle, weathering, soil, and how Earth systems connect, plus exam strategy for reading data and structuring a Design an Investigation response.
Session 2: Land Use and Energy (Units 5 and 6)
Mining, urbanization, and energy resources from a geoscientist’s view, paired with the Propose a Solution FRQ and the energy math students most often skip.
Session 3: Global Change (Unit 9)
How scientists read the climate record, the science of feedback loops and oceans, and the Design an Investigation FRQ as a capstone, plus the data-reading skills that run through the whole exam.
Switch Classroom resources from the series
These are the free resources referenced across the three sessions. All are editable and built for APES.
- APES Objectives (unit-specific study checklists)
- APES Resource Collection
- FRQ Score Builder
- APES Task Verbs (Power Level System)
- APES Math Problems and Conversions Practice
- APES Exam Prep Collection
Colorado School of Mines: opportunities for students
For teachers whose students want to go further with earth and environmental science:
A few extras
- APES Energy Lessons Beyond Unit 6 Quick-Start Guide. This collection is new and wasn’t part of the series, but it covers several of the energy topics the sessions touched on, so it’s a natural next stop.
- Join the Switch Classroom newsletter for new APES resources as they’re released.