Curriculum and Resources

The Medicine Chest is filled with multidisciplinary, standards-based classroom lessons and sample stewardship activities. It describes how improper storage and disposal of unwanted medicines can be harmful to people, pets, and the environment. This service-learning guide is designed for middle and high schools and features samples of student projects, including billboards, eco-poems, songs, artwork, and student presentations. It can be used as a classroom resource or in informal educational settings, such as after-school clubs or programs. Students benefit by using problem-based learning scenarios and gain skills in decision-making, cooperative learning, teamwork, communication and leadership. The curriculum was developed by IISG and the P2D2 Program.

Sensible Disposal of Unwanted Medicines: 4-H Guide helps 4-H members and students in grades 6–12 understand why medicines have been found in the environment, the harm they can cause, and what can be done to keep them out of the water. Students can serve as “agents for change” by providing useful information to family and community members. The guide was developed by Purdue University.

The Pollution Prevention Explorer, developed by Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant, is a compilation of educational resources for students of all ages and lifelong learners. Educators can explore a sortable list of external resources on the topics of water pollution and pollution prevention, or any action that reduces, eliminates, or prevents pollution at its source, including Pharmaceutical Pollution & Unwanted Medicine. Do you know of a resource that should be included? Contact us and let us know!

Service-Learning

Maybe you are interested in service-learning projects related to this topic but aren’t quite sure where to begin. If that’s the case, we encourage you to browse through The Medicine Chest curriculum, which has a chapter devoted to student stewardship projects. There you will find all the tools you need to get students excited about raising awareness in your community.

Students have shown there are lots of ways to help protect water quality—whether it is giving a presentation to city leaders to encourage them to start permanent medicine collection programs, writing songs or poems to teach other students and local citizens about this issue, or creating artwork for medicine collection boxes. We would love to hear from you about how your class is getting involved. If you have a project you’d like to share, please Contact Us.