One Planet Living Challenge

Challenge your students to live sustainably!

In this challenge, students learn about sustainable living and design a home that meets their needs in a way that considers the many aspects of living lightly on the Earth.

How To Start:

In my class, I started teaching about the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG's) in September. We reviewed all of the current goals using a variety of activities that can be found on the United Nations website - link: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/student-resources/. I also found some excellent resources on a website called "The World's Largest Lesson" - link: https://worldslargestlesson.globalgoals.org/. We completed many activities as the year progressed, and some of these I have shared in the UN Goals section of the website.

Project Plans:

To get students thinking about One Planet Living, we used what we had learned about the UN Goals and focused on ones that would allow us to consider how we would build homes and be able to feed ourselves in a sustainable way. We researched housing materials, explored agriculture methods including indoor grow towers, investigated various energy producing methods that could be used 'off grid' in a sustainable way, and even researched green buildings and how they are built. This took several lessons and incorporated many subject areas including teaching about healthy foods (health), energy (Matter and Energy science strand in grade 5 and 6), and structure materials and buildings (Structures and Mechanisms science strand).

Projects then began by working in teams and collaborating on where on Earth they would live sustainably. Discussions around climate and sustainable living were important in order for them to decide which areas on Earth are easier to live in and have less of an impact on. Most students chose to live off grid in the country, but realized that they would be far from cities and need some form of transportation to get things they might need and materials for building their homes. They then chose a form of transportation that would be sustainable, and that was another part of the project.

Once students had chosen where they would live, they designed a home that would match the climate they were going to live in and materials that would be accessible. They also considered how they would grow their own food, deal with waste, how they would provide energy to their home, and how they could reduce the impact they would have on the land around them by giving back to the local ecosystem. For example, most students chose to live near water so they could fish for some of their food, but they realized that they could not overfish or they would not be able to use that resource in the future. They had to be creative in their choices of how to provide food but not run out. Most students also built chicken coops and had large gardens to help them.

Students then constructed their homes and additional outbuildings using balsa wood on large styrofoam boards. They used 1cm by 1cm graphing paper to plan out their floor plan and measure their lengths of wood for the outside and inside walls. They made frame buildings using the balsa wood and then made walls out of bristol board, paper, cardboard, or popsicle sticks. This involved many math calculations and measurements, which covered many of the math curriculum sections for measurement (I also had them calculate their home's perimeter and area).

I bought kits from Kidder for building solar panels and wind turbines, which students built an placed on their project boards to power their homes. They hooked up the power source to a light that they placed inside their homes. This also covered some science expectations for the Matter and Energy strands for grades 5 and 6.

As a final part of the project, they decorated their project boards with homemade trees and gardens, as well as painted lakes, rivers, streams, grass, and other items such as a basketball court for one group! They displayed their boards for the school to see, and included a write-up about their choices for sustainable living with their homes and living choices.

This was a great project which incorporated many important learning goals in many subject areas for grade 5 and 6. I am going to use the same project plan with my grade 4 class this year with some modifications to incorporate grade 4 curriculum goals, such as building their home in Canada (grade 4 social studies).