Engage Students: Basketball Meets Sustainable Forestry!

These lessons are a slam dunk!

We've got basketball on the brain. Can you blame us?

Back in October, at the start of the NBA season, we wrote about hardwood flooring perhaps a bit more from the perspective of forest products fans than true sports fans.

This month, with NCAA's March Madness officially upon us, we return to the hardwood with a ready-to-use partner resource you can use in your classrooms and outdoor educational spaces.

“Using Sports to Understand Sustainable Forestry and the Environmental Benefits of Hardwood” was created by The Maple Flooring Manufacturers Association (MFMA) Sustainability Initiative.

Connor® Sports, NCAA® Men’s Final Four®, New Orleans, 2022

Image courtesy of the Daily Bruin

This project brought the MFMA together with Thea Lemberger from Rosewood West. Thea isn't just a basketball fan, she is a former member of UCLA Bruin's women's basketball team and also played professionally with FIBA. She has a Masters in Environmental Sciences from Oregon State University where she served as a teaching assistant for courses in climate sustainability and forestry.

LEAF met Thea last fall as she was developing this project. We've provided feedback along the way and are excited to share the results of her efforts with the Wisconsin K-12 Forestry Education community.

The MFMA Sustainability Initiative's Lesson Plan Package - including two full-day lesson plans, a student reading page, observation/data sheet, assessment, and teacher guide - supports the next generation of forest leaders.

Links are also on maplefloor.org, which is where future updates will be posted. If you have questions about these resources contact the MFMA at mfma@maplefloor.org for assistance.

Arbor Day Planning - Increase Student Participation

Whether as a class project or a community-wide event, Arbor Day puts the focus on trees - planting them and celebrating trees in our communities.

As an educator, you want to be sure your students learn about more than just the mechanical aspects of planting. Luckily, Arbor Day has a host of ways to engage student interests.

Experiment with making the event a more participatory one this year with some of these ideas to increase student involvement.

Where to plant? You may or may not have a lot of control over what you plant, depending on your source of seedlings, but you always have some control over where you plant. Have students explore and explain the different characteristics they might expect from different tree species. Remember students have valuable first-hand experience of your school grounds and school forests that can assist in site selection.

Who to invite? Prompt students to brainstorm ways to reach out to their school community and the broader local community to invite them to the event. Not only is this a great learning experience, but with a little bit of coaching, the ask to the mayor or local media can be a lot more effective coming from a student.

How to document the event? Will you take photos or videos? Will you write poems or draw pictures? Engage students in determining how they'd like to approach this, then empower them to take on some of these tasks.

How'd it go? When the day is past, have students spend some time together discussing what they learned. What went well? What didn't? What would they do differently next year? Ask yourself, can a student facilitate this discussion? What ground rules would make that feasible?

What now? Planting a tree may be where things end, but depending on the location, is there a way to involve students in the ongoing monitoring and maintenance of their seedlings as they grow? Brainstorm the best ways to engage this process together and let students take the role of stewards as the trees as they develop.

Let us know if you have success with these or other ideas this Arbor Day. Email us at leaf@uwsp.org. Better yet, see if a student would be willing to share your classes' experience with us!

Professional Development

In-Person Trainings

Applied Forestry for the High School Classroom | April 16 | Stevens Point

School Forest Seed Collection Workshop | July 14 | Kronenwetter

Resistance, Resilience and Transition: Learning About Climate Smart Forestry | July 31 | Wauwatosa

On-Demand Trainings

LEAF On-Demand, Online Offerings

Project Learning Tree On-Demand, Online Offerings

SAVE THE DATE: July 14!

Seed Collection Workshop

Join fellow outdoor educators to learn how to collect tree seeds to support reforestation efforts at school forests and elsewhere across Wisconsin. Design a program to lead your students to collect seeds to sell to Wisconsin's State Nursery. The seedlings grown from them will go back to school forests. Educators will gain experience with tree identification and natural history as related to seed production. Most of this workshop will take place outside at one or more school forests.

Cost: $50

Date & Time: 10:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m., Monday, July 14, 2025

Location: Twin Oaks Environmental Station, Kronenwetter, WI

Learn More!

USDA Forest Products Laboratory Tour

The USDA's Forest Products Laboratory in Madison offers a variety of tour options, including an in-person tour on the third Thursday of each month.

LEAF Outreach Specialist Steve Schmidt was inspired by the excellent Into the Outdoors episode featuring the Forest Product Lab that was released last fall. He organized a group of LEAF staff to take the in-person tour last month.

Many of us had never been to the facility and it was a wonderful way to connect the past, present and future of forest products together.

We highly recommend a visit.

Alicia King, the lab's Assistant Director of Communications and Science Delivery, lead our tour group. At this stop, Alicia explained some of the lab's cutting-edge research into nanocellulose (wood fiber broken down into super small particles) for potential use in everything from chip bag linings to foam insulation.

Center for Wood Anatomy Research Botanist Rafael Arevalo Burbano explains the difference between heartwood and sapwood using one of the more than 100,000 specimens in the lab's Library.

The Wood Shop is where various structural elements are built for durability testing in other parts of the lab.

This room is where various wood products and construction techniques can be put to the test to analyze how much weight they can hold. Other parts of the lab test other aspects of durability including fire resistance and the effects of water, sunlight and wind on wooden building materials.

Have questions or need additional resources? Contact us at leaf@uwsp.edu. We are here to support educators and students with forestry opportunities.

Workshops

Kits

Curriculum

Published for March 2025