Sustainability Tips for Eco-aware Kids 

Let's get green! Here's 5 fun ways to stimulate eco-friendly thinking and practices in your OSCAR class.

1. Audit for awareness 

Make a project out of collecting your programme waste for a week (or month). At the end of the week/month lay it out on a sheet or newspaper to sort and examine. What kinds of waste are there? What is there the most of? Who created the most and least waste? What does it all mean? Challenge kids to do a waste audit with their family to spark awareness and change.

2. Be no-waste ninjas   

Reusing, repurposing and upcycling are core skills that will set kids up with the right mind-set to solve many sustainability problems. Create a class culture of innovative reusability, and award the 'No-waste Ninja of the Month'. Make a waste station area to collect unrecyclable items from home (broken ceramics and crockery, styrofoam, TetraPak cartons, and metal/plastic bottle caps are common offenders) and brainstorm ways to reuse your supply in an on-going way   

3. Dispose of disposable culture

teach kids old-timey skills like knitting, sewing, crochet, woodwork and cooking on your OSCAR programme, along with the ethos of "mend and make do". If something breaks, how can we fix it?   

4. Encourage empathy   

Empathy the ability to understand and share the experience of another can be a sustainability superpower when applied to our animal, plant and mineral neighbours. Instead of applying human or personal needs, feelings and ideas to our fellow earth inhabitants, workshop what it might be like to actually be a rock, tree or marmoset from their own perspectives. What are their lives like? Do they have thoughts and feelings? If not why do they act the way they do? What do they need? How do humans help or hinder them? This thought exercise is great for tapping into young imaginations while building an appreciation and respect for all life 

5. Cultivate kaitiakitanga

Kaitiakitanga is a Maori concept based on the deep connection between people and the natural world, and informs our role in nurturing, protecting, and respecting our environment and resources. Assign groups as kaitiaki (guardians) of the different resources you use daily to practice understanding lifecycles and how to manage impacts on both people and the planet. The kaitiaki make the rules for that resource everybody else follows them! How will you decide, communicate and enforce your guardianship? How will you balance the way you care for your resource and the people using it?

Is your office as sustainable as your OSCAR programme?