Cross-curricular Themes

My Local Environment – Level 1

Suggested learning outcomes for environmental education

Students will develop:

knowledge and understanding of:

• the significant natural landmarks in the local community;
• changes to these resources that may have occurred in the past and could occur in the future;
• the influence people may have on these resources;
• why these resources are important to them, their families, and their local community.

skills, such as:

• communication
  

  –	speaking confidently and recording ideas in an appropriate manner,
  –	listening to information from a variety of sources;

• critical thinking – organising and classifying information to reach tentative conclusions;
• co-operation – participating in a group and completing tasks co-operatively;
• decision making – choosing a solution or making a decision and giving reasons.

attitudes and values, such as:

• an appreciation of and concern for natural resources;
• an awareness of the need for individual and group action in maintaining a natural resource.

Achievement objectives from selected curriculum statements that could be used as a focus for the environmental education topic My Local Environment

These include:

Science
Making Sense of Planet Earth and Beyond
Students can:

• share their ideas about some easily observable features and patterns that occur in their physical environment and how some of these features may be protected (AO1/4);
• suggest ways that their immediate physical environment was different in the past (AO2).

Social Studies
Place and Environment
Students will understand:

• why particular places are important for people;
• how and why people record the important features of places and environments.

English
Oral Language: Listening to Texts
Students should listen and respond to texts and relate them to personal experience.

Oral Language: Interpersonal Speaking
Students should converse and talk about personal experiences.

Suggested learning experiences that could enable students to meet the learning outcomes of environmental education in association with achievement objectives from selected curriculum statements

• Compare photographs of the local area that were taken a long time ago with those taken recently and discuss any changes in the environment.
• Listen to someone who has lived in the area for many years talk about how the local environment has changed during that time.
• Draw pictures of the trees in a local park and suggest ways to look after them.
• Identify important natural resources in the local environment, draw them, and then place the drawings on a wallchart that locates their position in relation to the school grounds.
• Talk about how people use and enjoy a local resource and make a class list of ways that this resource could be looked after.
• In planning a class trip to a local area, discuss the concept of taking back to the classroom only pictures and leaving only footprints.
• Undertake a visit to a local area and discuss why that area might be special.
• Draw pictures, individually, of what they would like a special local environment to look like in the future.

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