Adopt-a-Beach™ for Your Classroom
Give your students a hands-on connection to science and their community with Adopt-a-Beach.
For more than 30 years, the Adopt-a-Beach program has brought people together to keep Great Lakes shorelines healthy, safe, and beautiful. This year-round service-learning opportunity lets you teach outdoors at your local Great Lakes shoreline. Students connect to a local beach while learning about beach health and the impacts a community can have on natural areas.
Organize a one-time cleanup, or include several cleanups in a larger unit or a multi-year service project.
Create an Adopt-a-Beach cleanup for your students
Scheduling a cleanup for your students is easy:
- Choose an adult from your school to become a Team Leader.
- Have your Team Leader register your event.
- Collect waivers. If you plan to use you your school’s waiver, please email us a blank copy. If you do not plan to use a school waiver, email us and we can assist you with appropriate paperwork.
If you have any questions, Alliance staff are here to help! You can reach us at adoptabeach@greatlakes.org.
Lesson plans for Adopt-a-Beach
If you’d like deepen your students’ learning, check out the free lesson plans you can use before, during, and after your Adopt-a-Beach cleanup. All documents and data sets in the lesson plans can be found on this page.
These NGSS-aligned lesson plans are designed to support students in thinking critically about how humans impact the environment.
Want to take it even further? Educators also have free access to our full NGSS-aligned curriculum, Great Lakes in Our World, which teaches core science concepts and improves critical thinking skills while connecting students to their community and the incredible natural resource in their own backyard.
Data requests
At each cleanup, students collect litter and record data on what they find. Afterwards, the Team Leader enters the data online, where it joins data from other volunteers across the region to form a larger picture of Great Lakes coastal litter.
The litter data you enter, as well as historical litter data, is available to use in classrooms for analyzing and interpreting data, constructing explanations, and designing solutions. Visit our data page for year-by-year summaries. If you would like to request data with specific parameters (e.g. plastic bottles collected in Michigan from 2018-2020), reach out to us at adoptabeach@greatlakes.org.