Teaching sustainability in primary school can be a difficult task for several reasons.
Your lesson might be one of the first instances your pupils have heard key sustainability terms when they can discuss them. So, key terms must be explained simply with language that under-12s are familiar with.
If teaching sustainability lessons is outside of your comfort zone it can result in key messages being lost.
The teaching experts here at PlanBee understand first-hand the importance of teaching environmental issues to students while making them fun and relevant. This is why we have put together the following tips to help you teach sustainability in primary school.
Your pupils will be receptive to messages that they can put into practice. So, what better opportunity is there, than to engage your students with a “Where is Water” lesson? Not only does the lesson include comprehensive slides and printable resources, but you can also link student learning to real-life tasks. Encourage your students to monitor how long they leave the tap on when brushing their teeth or helping their parents with the washing up. As a class, you can think of creative ways to conserve our water resources in the home. Students are never too young to start learning practical problem-solving skills!
Teach pupils to take ownership of their carbon footprint. Alongside teaching these Reduce, Reuse, Recycle lessons, ensure you have a class recycling box. Give different pupils each week the responsibility for taking waste plastic and cardboard to the recycling box, and at the end of the week explain where the waste will go next. You could then encourage pupils to look out for the “recycled” logo on items such as pencils and food packaging. Ask them to report back whenever they see a “recycled” logo - this will keep them conscious of the origin of items they use both inside and outside of school.
Add real-world simulation tasks to simplify the complexities of fair trade for your primary school sustainability lessons. Our What is Fair Trade: Fair and Unfair? resource provides a “shopping list” for pupils to “shop” in the classroom choosing certain products on product cards, and then assessing whether these are fair trade products.
Put your unique spin on the lesson by using real items from the shopping list that can be bought from local supermarkets. By using familiar items to your cohort of pupils they are more likely to remember the lesson when they see the products in the supermarket. Your pupils may even share their knowledge of fairtrade with their families!
Reinforce their learning with a follow-up in Friday show-and-tell. Encourage pupils to find five fair trade products in their own homes. If they can’t find any, teach them why fair trade is not supported by all brands, then discover alternative fair trade products.
Introduce children to the idea of Circular Economies and products that are shared between groups of people, including tool libraries. Bring this concept into their lived experience by encouraging the children to think about the pros and cons of every child having their own set of resources in the school. Where would all the paints, brushes, pens, scissors, hacksaws, computers and printers go and how much would all these resources cost?
Planning your lessons on sustainability is essential as your pupils will be learning new concepts, which can be tricky to grasp at first. The success of a lesson is in the planning so that the proceeding lesson goes smoothly and your pupils get the most value out of the exercises.
For more information on our ESR resources, check out our introductory blog. In the meantime, reclaim your weekends with our online catalogue of resources!
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