Biodiversity #EcoSchoolsAtHome

Dear Eco-Schools and home Eco-Schoolers,

In order to help support those of you still working in school and those of you who are now having to home school we wanted to create a new set of Eco-School resources that could be adapted to enable you to work on a variety of environmental topics with young people of any age – whilst juggling a million and one other tasks and difficulties due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Let’s call the programme Eco-Home for now…

Every Tuesday at 8.00pm for the next 10 weeks we will be releasing a new Eco-Schools Topic handout that will include 5 different topic related tasks that can be undertaken both at home and in school – this evening: Biodiversity (link below)!

The topic actions have been designed so that they can be carried out by nursery children and college students alike. We have made our actions as inclusive as possible and all take into account the new lock down measures that were introduced by the Government last night. You do not need any additional resources, time or money to implement these actions and if you choose they can be extended and carried out over the weekend. We have also made sure that all actions are in line with the current national curriculum and can be undertaken alongside work set by schools as additional or supporting tasks. We can assure you that the national Eco-Schools team between us have over 20 years teaching experience in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors, including examining. Actions have been tried and tested by our own pupils (and in some cases our own children)!

You may or may not be aware that Eco-Schools is the largest educational programme in the world – with nearly 70 different countries running the programme. Like in us in England nearly all of these countries have now had to close their schools in order to slow and prevent the spread of COVID-19. Therefore our global Eco-Schools ‘family’ are encouraging schools, pupils and families to share with us their eco-home schooling on social media using #EcoSchoolsStayHome and #EcoSchoolsAtHome. We would love you to do the same when carrying out our different topic actions, therefore please make sure to @ us on Facebook, Twitter and Insta in any photos you post. It definitely makes working from home a lot more fun and rewarding for our team to see some smiling faces! We may even consider launching an Eco-Schools Tik Tok if this goes well…

As we are still very much teachers at heart we are always keen to develop and improve our resources to make sure that they are suitable and of real value. Therefore we actively encourage you to send us your feedback and experience of how the tasks went. If we need to do something different then please let us know via email at eco-schools@keepbritaintidy.org. Also if you have ideas for other topic actions please share with us: energy, global citizenship, healthy living, litter, marine, school (home) grounds, transport, waste and water.

Finally we also want to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you for taking the time to visit our website to download and use our new Eco-Schools at home resources even in these challenging times you are still continuing to support the programme, we are extremely grateful. Together we will all get through this.

Stay safe and well everyone
Lee, Francis, Karyn and Shona

Click here to download #EcoSchoolsAtHome Biodiversity work

Photographs Courtesy of Students at St Mary’s School for Girls, Colchester