Teach your students all about renewable and nonrenewable resources and natural resources this school year with printable worksheets, activities, vocabulary guides and more created by teachers for your primary lessons.
Aligned with the Australian V9 curriculum, this collection of teaching resources has been created with differentiated options and editable versions to make your lesson plans easier to create and save you time! Each resource in this collection has been thoroughly reviewed by a member of the Teach Starter teacher team to ensure it's classroom-ready.
New to teaching this section of the curriculum or looking for fresh ideas to explain the difference between renewable and nonrenewable resources and why these are so important? Read on for a primer from our teacher team!
To explain renewable and nonrenewable and the differences between them, students have to first understand what it means to have a natural resource.
Natural resources are materials or substances that are naturally occurring in the environment and are valuable to humans for their economic, environmental, or cultural benefits. These resources are generally classified into two categories — renewable and nonrenewable resources.
Need a kid-friendly way to explain this concept? Try this one: A renewable resource is a natural resource that we can use over and over again without running out.
It's sort of like having a cookie jar that never runs out of cookies. Only in this case, the 'cookies' provide the energy we need for things like heating our homes and running the electrical items in our schools.
Sometimes renewable resources will be regenerated naturally, while others require human intervention (for example, tree planting replenishes the wood supply but requires people to do some work!).
Some examples of renewable resources include:
As the prefix 'non' would indicate, nonrenewable resources are essentially the opposite of the renewable type. These natural resources used to create energy cannot be easily replenished or replaced.
Some may be used up entirely over time, and once they're gone, they will be gone for good. Others may come back, but the time it takes to come back is so long that it won't happen for thousands or even millions of years, which means we will run out too quickly.
Many nonrenewable resources create other issues, such as the harm that burning fossil fuels represents to the environment. Nonrenewable resources are often considered unsustainable, and their use is a major contributor to environmental degradation, climate change and other global issues.
Some examples of nonrenewable resources that you can share with your students include:
Many of the resources we have are tied to the energy we use to power our houses, our cars and more. We classify these energy types as either renewable energy or non-renewable energy.
So what's the difference? Let's look at a breakdown you can share with students.
The energy that comes from natural resources that can be replenished over a relatively short period of time is called renewable energy.
Types of renewable energy include:
Non-renewable energy is produced with finite resources that cannot be easily replenished.
Sources of non-renewable energy include: