2. Human Problems
What makes a city or town sustainable?
Read the graphic below to learn about sustainable cities and communities. Match the keyword vocabulary to the pictures below the graphic to help you understand the important features of a sustainable community.
Think about our community. Observe and discuss with your family the things you see in the community that are sustainable and the things that could be improved. Can you think of examples in our community of each keyword?
Keyword Vocabulary
Inclusive Safe Resilient Sustainable Quality Monitoring Appreciation Protection Engage Organize Adaptable
Match each picture to a keyword.
Picture Collage About Sustainability
Find or take pictures that show examples of 5 ways our community is sustainable. Find 3 ways we can improve to be more sustainable. Put your pictures together to make a collage.
Collage is arranging different materials on a flat surface. The way that you arrange the materials tells a story or shares a message. You can use many different things to make a collage. A simple collage could include pictures, leaves, strings and words cut from a newspaper or magazine that are arranged a glued onto a piece of paper. You can also create a digital collage with an app like PicCollage on a phone or tablet.
What are some human problems related to sustainability?
Watch this video about Sustainable Cities created for and by students in Portugal. The narrator and children are speaking Portugese in the video, but you can read the translation in subtitles.
What are they changing to make the city more sustainable? Make a list of the changes the students make in their city model to create a sustainable city.
Before and After City Comparison
Our world changes over time. Population, the number of people living in a place, can cause different changes as people move to live in different areas.
For young students: Look at the photos. How have the cities changed as more people move into them? Choose one city and one set of photographs. Make a T chart like the example below. List the things you see in the earliest picture on the left side of the T chart. List the things you see in the most recent picture on the right side of the T chart. Put a star next to the good things. Draw a box around the bad things. See the example for New York City below, then make your own chart for Hong Kong or Athens, Greece.
Hong Kong, 1920 - 2000
Athens, Greece 1860 - 2010
For older students: Look at the pictures to compare how cities have changed, then explore the interactive map and video at worldpopulationhistory.org. What happens as the population grows?
What cities are nearest the population growth areas? Choose one city or area to research. Find a picture of your city. Can you find a picture of the same city before the population grew? What do you think it will look like in 2050 with an even larger population? Draw a diagram of the city in 2050. Identify some good things in the city. What are some problems that might exist?
What problems will you solve?
All living things have the same basic needs. Large cities, or urban centers, allow many people to share a space and its resources. However, urban centers can also create new challenges. How do we get enough food and clean water for all of the people? What happens to the waste that is created? How do we make sure there is enough space and that everyone can use the spaces that are shared? These are big problems, but we can start to fix them with small solutions. Watch the videos and read the passages below. Choose a problem to explore and start thinking about how you might be able to solve one small part of it.
Tell us about the problem you want to solve in our STEM Camp FlipGrid: My Sustainability Problem
Food
Simple Hydroponic Garden Activity
kidsgardening.org/garden-activities-hydroponic-system/
Click the links above to make your own simple indoor garden. How does this garden help the plant get everything it needs? How could this activity help to provide food for the people in a city?
Learn more about urban gardening at the link below:
What other ideas do you have about sustainable food sources?
Waste
Why is plastic waste such a problem? Watch the video above to find out.
How does nature manage waste? Check out the experiment at the link below to find out how the Earth can help us recycle different materials.
Explore other activities at Kids Ecology Corps. Choose an experiment to try. Share what you learned from your experiment in our FlipGrid.
Living Space
Explore the resources at
Learn about all of the things a city planner thinks about and then design or improve your own city.
Parents and Caregivers, explore this link and website with your students as you learn with children from the United Kingdom.