Grades 4-8: Pest PSA Lesson Plan

In this six-session Pest PSAlesson plan, students use the PestWorldforKids.org “Pest Guide” section to develop a Public Service Announcement (PSA) for their school community. The PSA will communicate the threats and impacts a pest may cause and methods for preventing an infestation. Students should include when it is necessary to call in a pest control professional to address an infestation.

• Download the complete lesson (1.4MB PDF document)
• Download the handout "PSA Notes" (72k PDF document)
• Download the handout PSA "Storyboard" (134k PDF document)

Correlations with National Standards

National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)

Standard 1: Students read a wide range of print and non-print texts … to acquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.

• Students will use the PestWorldforKids.org Pest Guide to acquire new information about a specific pest.

Standard 3. Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features.

• Students are prompted to recall their prior knowledge as well as share their written work with other students to check for clarity.

Standard 5. Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.

• This lesson invokes many of the elements of process writing, including pre-writing, editing & revising, and publishing. Students are prompted to consider their audience when developing their PSA.

National Science Teachers Association (NSTA)

Life Science Content Standard C: As a result of activities in grades K – 4, all students should develop understanding of: The characteristics of organisms

Life Science Content Standard C: As a result of activities in grades 5 – 8, all students should develop understanding of: Structure and function in living systems.

• Students use the “Pest Guide” section of the PestWorldforKids.org web site to identify a pest’s basic needs, its anatomy and impact on the home environment.