Climate Thinking

Use our Y oung Climate Activists Climate change, living sustainably, and connecting with our natural environment can and must become key features of our lessons, across all subjects: as the defining crisis of our time, climate change impacts everything. Use the following first as models, to identify and unpick key skills, then as inspiration to apply the skills to the pupils own work.   1.       Model writing – identify key skills 2.       Explore impact on reader 3.       Apply skills to own writing   Persuasive Super Power: Greta Thunberg   No one can deny how passionate and persuasive Greta Thunberg is. A Swedish environmental activist who is known for challenging world leaders to take immediate action for climate change mitigation, she was just 15 when she first began to skip school to protest outside parliament for more action against climate change – the same age as the pupils...

Our Pupils & Planet Need You! Climate change, living sustainably, and connecting with our natural environment can and must become key features of our lessons, across all subjects: as the defining crisis of our time, climate change impacts everything.   Flexibility of the National Curriculum Teach the Future point out that “The national curriculum has not been substantively or systematically reviewed for at least eight years, and doesn't look like it will happen anytime soon”.     If you are an academy, you don’t even need to follow the national curriculum – you could opt to construct a robust program of your own.   So don’t wait - use the flexibility within (and the potential freedom away from) the national curriculum to utilise every situation possible to push the green agenda , giving pupils (and staff) a deeper understanding of the environment, to help celebrate our relationship with nature, and to learn how we can best protect it.     ...

I live in land-locked Worcester, but I come from the sunny Suffolk coast: listening to the news just now, how 200 meters of Hemsby’s road has fallen into the sea, makes me feel incredibly sad, incredibly angry, and utterly, utterly baffled.   A resident said it came out of the blue: it was “unexpected, absolutely terrifying, heartbreakingly – I’ve been crying all day – I don’t actually understand why this has happened because no one told us it was going to happen, no one warned us about high tide, no one said about storms or anything – it’s just terrifying.” Hemsby Resident on BBC 6 Music News   (approx. 1 hr 30 in) So whose job is it to inform us of the disastrous effects of climate change?   Who informs the public on the climate emergency?   Government? Media? Local communities?   Ourselves?     Climate change is the defining crisis of our time, and it is happening even more quickly than we feared: and yet, daily life does not look like an...

Our pupils are faced with the senseless, existential threat that is climate breakdown right now.     This decade is our make-or-break opportunity to limit warming to 1.5°C and steer the world toward a net-zero future; as educators, we play a vital role in helping to create a better, greener world. www.teachthefuture.uk   We can reach all pupils and tackle the issue holistically by ensuring that the teaching of the climate crisis, living sustainably, and connecting with our natural environment is at the heart of everything we teach. This is where Teach The Future’s Tracked Changes review is so incredibly useful. Their researched documentation shows what a new curriculum for England could look like by suggesting where and how the national curriculum can be amended to include sustainability and climate education, providing guidance on how to engage with the climate crisis so that young people feel empowered to participate in tackling it, rather than feeling hopeless and scar...