Full Year of APES (AP Environmental Science) Notes

If it's your first year teaching APES, here is a starting point! I use these notes within my own classroom and my students are always very successful on their APES exam.

This purchase is well over 1 GB in size. I use video clips from youtube in my notes that greatly contribute to the file size; I did not make the videos and do not claim to have any rights to them. I tried to get each from a source that had the right to publish them for public viewing. You can easily delete them if you do not like the clips. I also add lots of news articles throughout the presentations. Each is linked to the source, and again, you can delete if you want less slides.

Because this set of notes is so large, I couldn't upload it on TpT so I added a word document with a link to the shared slide presentations via google drive. My email is listed on the document as well, so you can contact me if you have ANY problems. You'll learn that APES is ever changing and your notes will be too, but this should give you plenty to work with. Please respect the work I have put into these notes (hundreds of hours is no exaggeration), and do not share the google drive link with others.

You will receive nine unit Google slide presentations with this purchase, and for the record, you can definitely use these with a regular environmental course. This is material to cover a full school year, so you would definitely NOT be covering all the notes for a unit at one time. I personally don't like to lecture more than 15-30 minutes at a time, but sometimes I have to since I teach on a block schedule with 90 min class periods. Since the amount of material can be overwhelming and it may be hard for 1st year APES teachers to see how to break a unit into smaller chunks, I am pasting how I personally break apart these notes to cover various sections on different days (see bottom of this description).

As of April 2020, I have redesigned everything to follow the new order suggested by College Board. I am including a pdf of the essential knowledge statements from the CED, so you can see the few things that I chose to put in a different unit than recommended. This order makes it much easier to use the materials on AP classroom, but it also makes unit 5 and unit 8 extremely heavy in notes. If you want each unit to have the same amount of notes, you will not want to follow the order from College Board and you will need to do a lot of rearranging if you buy these notes.

As of July 2022, I am switching all powerpoint presentations to google slides. The animations are less since google slides does not have the same options as powerpoint. This changes the formatting on the slides and while I tried to catch all issues as I switched over, there may be some still. I will update anything as needed as I use them alongside you in my own classroom.

I highly recommend having your students read whatever textbook you choose to use. The more students are exposed to the information through documentaries, activities, and reading, the better.

I've included the slide handouts I give my students on Google Drive as well (you can see the first unit's handout in the preview). They are the same presentations in handout form with a few things deleted. I do this so I can go very quickly through the material, hitting the highlights, encouraging discussion and letting students read the bulk of the heavy information slides for themselves.

I have my students complete two research projects/presentations; one over energy sources and one over pollutants. I'm including the instructions I use for both in case you are interested.

Unit 1

A Brief Review from Biology

Terrestrial Biomes - Freshwater Biomes

Marine Biomes

Biogeochemical Cycles

Unit 2

Introduction

Forests - Extinction

HIPPCO

Ways to Combat Premature Extinction

Laws

Unit 3

Demographics - Mathematics

Population Curves - Factors that Affect TFR

Age Structure - Demographic Transition

Demographics of Countries

Problems - Review Slides

Unit 4

Plate Tectonics - Soil Properties

Finish Soil

Air Circulation

Unit 5

Water's Importance - Aquifers

Forests - Agriculture/Erosion

Water & Fertilizers in Agriculture

Pesticides in Agriculture

Sustainability in Agriculture

Producing Meat

Mining

Unit 6

Coal & Oil

Renewable Intro - Solar

Wind - Water

Geothermal - Nuclear

Alternative Fuels - Hydrogen

Ethanol - Laws

Unit 7

Major Air Pollutants - Acid Deposition

Indoor Air Pollution

Preventing Pollution - Legislation

Unit 8

Types of Water Pollution

Specific Water Issues

Water Quality Measures

Sewage Treatment - Legislation

Waste - Burning Waste

Recycling and Specific Recycled Items

IWM - NIMBY

Toxicology

Unit 9

Ozone Depletion - Start Climate Change

Climate Change Cont

Finish Climate Change - Legislation