Leveraging Life Terra resources to inspire climate action in the classes

Life Terra is one of Europe’s largest climate action initiatives, co-financed by the European Commission through the LIFE Programme (LIFE19 CCM/NL/001200). It seeks to bring people together to take impactful climate action by facilitating tree planting, educating future generations, and developing tree monitoring technology.

Life Terra is founded on the knowledge that tree planting is regarded as the most cost-effective nature-based solution to capture carbon, and can play an important role in the fight against climate change. Concurrently, deepening communities’ understanding of sustainability issues and ensuring they feel responsible for the implementation of these solutions, are key conditions for long-term change.

For this reason, Life Terra placed an important focus on educating the future generations on the sustainability challenges of our century, and encouraging them to take climate action. 

The project strives to achieve its objective through three educational main resources: 

• The Terra Mission Educational Pack, which supports teachers in the promotion of environmental education. It is structured around 8 interconnected sustainability themes (water, trees, waste, circular economy, climate change etc.). Each theme contains interactive lessons, problem-based assignments and ideas for outdoor activities. It also supports teachers in each step of the delivery of the content by offering teaching guides.
• Life Terra Guide for School Planting, that includes all the steps teachers and educators need to follow to organise a tree planting activity to inspire their students to take climate action. 
• The Terra Mission MOOC: Teaching Sustainability for Action. To help teachers navigate and adapt the contents shared within the planting guide and the Terra Mission pack, Scientix® and Life Terra created a Massive Open Online Course, available for free at the European Schoolnet Academy. Given its success, the MOOC was re-run in a second edition, with updated content and new live events. In this course educators acquired strategies to raise environmental awareness, explored the Terra Mission Educational pack, learned to plan engaging outdoor experiences, and designed their learning scenarios (LS). 

To support MOOC participants in this last activity, Life Terra showcased learning scenarios as best examples. The LSs were created by a group of six teachers who co-designed and implemented them in their classrooms.  The LSs integrated the Life Terra resources with innovative pedagogies such as project-based learning, outdoor learning and inquiry-based science education, and were aimed at helping students acquire competences that are aligned with the GreenComp. 

Life Terra participates to the Education for Climate Call for Inspiring Good Practices with six Learning Scenarios produced by teachers for the Terra Mission MOOC. 

The Learning Scenarios are available here: http://files.eun.org/scientix/LT-MOOC-LS.zip 

LS 1 - Butterfly Effect 

Subjects: geography, biology, arts

Length: 8 periods of 1h each (~8h)

Level: advanced

Setting: formal education, and external collaboration with local councillor.

Description:

This learning scenario for students aged 11 to 13 intends to help learners connect the impact of their actions to the Earth system, with a particular focus on CO2 emissions and deforestation. Students explore the issue of air pollution and deforestation at the global, local and personal level: they investigate the most and least polluted cities across the world, the areas most affected by deforestation, and the causes and effects of these phenomena; at the local level, they meet with the local councillor for the environment to discuss the current issues; at the personal level, they calculate their family's carbon footprint, and identify ways to reduce it. Finally, solutions are explored, and students create posters for an exhibition about the causes and consequences of CO2 emissions and deforestation. 

LS 2 – Energy Detectives

Subjects: natural sciences, social sciences, English, arts

Length: 5 periods of 1.5h each (~8h)

Level: advanced

Setting: formal education

Description:

This learning scenario for students aged 8 to 10 includes a series of engaging lessons that explore ways of reducing carbon emissions in an effort to move towards the use of renewable energy. The lessons aim to help students develop a greater understanding of renewable and non-renewable energy sources, and include outdoor activities such as observing and reporting on the type of traffic in the local area. The students examine the use of energy in a variety of situations within their daily lives (in the school, at home, in the streets). This learning scenario assists students to consider the actions necessary to reduce future non-renewable energy consumption.

LS 3 – Excursions Are Over!

Subjects: natural sciences, arts, English 

Length: 6 periods of 45 minutes (~5h) 

Level: Beginner

Setting: formal education

Description:

In this learning scenario for students 8 to 11 years, the School Principal makes an announcement to all the students to inform them that the excursions are over. Due to the climate change soon there will be no available places suitable for excursions so pupils will not have the opportunity to go on an excursion if something doesn’t change. Pupils, after gathering information, start an online campaign to inform people in their town about the problem of climate change and its consequences, and try to persuade the School Principal that the things can indeed change.

LS 4 – Use Water Sparingly

Subjects: natural sciences, arts, chemistry, English, citizenship

Length: 8 periods of 1.5h physically (12h), or 8 periods of 1h online (8h)

Level: Advanced

Setting: formal education with several collaborations with industry (through visit of a water treatment plant and the Aguda Coastal station) and with parents and the local community (outdoor experience cleaning the beach).

Description:

In this learning scenario students explore interconnected topics such as water pollution, plastic soup, climate change, CO2 and deforestation. For each topic, students conduct research on their areas of interest, reflect on their findings in groups, propose solutions, and engage in outdoor activities and creative tasks to deepen their understanding. For example, they initially explore how water is used and wasted in nowadays societies. They assess their school's water management system, and create posters suggesting improvements. Then, they visit a drinking water plant, to ask questions on its functioning. The water theme is later connected to oceans, their functions and the challenges they face (acidification, plastic soup, overfishing). After deeper research, they visit a local coastal station, collect its waste, and analyze the sand composition to identify plastics particles. Following this, students write an article about the experience and create a tree sculpture using the collected waste. 

LS 5 – Sustainable Table

Subjects: natural sciences, language, maths, environmental education, social sciences.

Length: (~12h)

Level: Advanced

Setting: formal education

Description:

In this learning scenario 8-9 years old students learn the value of food, its production chain, and the multiple consequences of wasting food. They are taught to think critically of the connections between food waste, environmental issues, and land, water, biodiversity, as well as energy loss, by exploring resources in English and sharing their findings with the classroom. They enhance their understanding of the complex issues related to food production and consumption chain by arranging a theatrical representation where they impersonate farmers, shoppers, animals, biodiversity and animals. They are also made aware of their own food consumption by keeping a weekly food waste diary, and, after estimating how much food is wasted by each city inhabitant in a week, they actively research solutions to reduce it. Finally, the connections between SDG 12 and all the other SDGs are explored through interactive activities and reflection moments. Finally, students design and create their own vegetable garden, and tend to it the whole year. 

LS 6 – A World Without Trees

Subjects: natural science, arts

Length: 2h

Level: beginner

Setting: formal education

Description:

In this LS, 11-14yo students learn about trees and the functions of all its parts by combining arts, their observational skills, and science knowledge. Students are invited to think about what the world would look like without trees, and write essays or create a poster based on their assumptions. The reflection allows the teacher to connect to the issue of deforestation. After learning more, students create an infographic about the topic. At the end of the LS, students have to give a speech about their topic, while the rest takes the role of the audience.