The Earth From Home:
A Homeschool Environmental Science Curriculum

developed by David J. Walbert for AY 2019–20

Note to readers, 2025

I developed this curriculum in 2019 for homeschool environmental science, based on the rich resources and ecosystems of North Carolina, where I live. Unlike most current environmental It was a very successful year; I learned almost as much as my daughter did, and once in college she decided to minor in environmental studies. I share the curriculum here not to be used as-is but as a suggestion of how homeschool science—really, how science in any context—might be taught.

If you want to adapt this curriculum, please note:

  • We are blessed in North Carolina with tremendous ecological and geological variety and were therefore uniquely positioned to incorporate field study into a broad curriculum.
  • It draws heavily on my own interests and knowledge, which may not be yours. (In particular, I incorporated more advanced math than you might—though if possible I recommend exploring it particularly for a student who may not particularly enjoy math.) The activities take a wide range of forms, but might be more directly tailored to individual students.
  • While I tried to write the schedule up thoroughly and professionally as we proceeded through the year, it was written for my own use at a particular time. (The schedule grows less detailed in late spring—after COVID hit and we had to adapt, and when I allowed more time for working on the capstone research paper.)

I hope you find this to be of some use.

Overview

This curriculum addresses the standards for AP Environmental Science (note: I used the 2013 version), but assigns those standards different weights than the AP curriculum (and is thus not necessarily designed to prepare the student for the AP test in that subject). While the AP standards provide a good list of topics to be covered in an advanced high school course, they assign too little weight to how the natural world works, and ought to work, and too much to what is wrong with it; it is as much (or more) a course in environmental policy as a course in environmental science. Specifically, in the AP course, 25–30% of time is to be spent studying pollution and another 10–15% on “global change,” meaning that fully half the course could address ways humans have screwed things up and what we ought to be doing about it. While these matters are important, we believe that to frame a high school course in terms of public policy is to put the cart before the horse. Specifically,

  1. It is irresponsible to attempt to change the world until one understands it as it is.
  2. Before one tries to understand the world, one ought to love it.

The most advanced course in science (any science, but environmental science especially) ought therefore to draw on the wonder of childhood nature study to animate its exploration of received scientific understanding and further development of tools for scientific inquiry, then (and only then) address the implications of this understanding for individual human activity and public policy.

To that end, this course

  • combines a broad range of scientific sources with “nature writing” that contextualizes the science;
  • focuses on local examples, using field study within North Carolina;
  • requires laboratory work, quantitative analysis, and written qualitative response as appropriate;
  • uses policy analysis as a capstone to integrate learning rather than as a framing device.

You can view and/or download the complete curriculum in PDF.