We Need To Protect Our Planet

We have recently started our Ecology unit in Outdoor Ed. Some of the key topics include ecosystems, food chains and microplastics in our oceans. Soon we will be having a presentation from AUSMAP and then a trip to the beach to remove some microplastics (I plan to blog about this later). So far, most of the students actually seem to be quite interested in the conversations we have been having which is a great start!

To begin, we had several discussions around what ecosystems are and why it is important we understand biodiversity. To give a bigger scale and more real-life contexts, we watched David Attenborough's A Life on Our Planet documentary. I watched this with my OUED class last semester near the end of our unit but realised it would fit well at the beginning! If you haven't watched it yet, head to Netflix ASAP because it is truly eye opening.

Throughout the doco it moves through time, from the past through to the future. As time passes stats are shown on the screen: human population goes up and wildlife goes down. Check out my quick graph I created of the stats up until 2020 alongside. This visual encouraged great discussion and students started to ask a variety of questions we could research together.

I planned a few questions to promote discussion;
- What do these stats suggest/show?
- How do these stats make you feel?
- Why do you feel this way?
- What are the impacts happening and why are these an issue?
- How are we contributing to these impacts?

(Sidenote: Preplanning questions is a great way in any class or topic to help you to guide discussion. Of course they can be ignored if there is great chat already, but it helps to reduce tangents and actually go back to the learning intention of the lesson).

The most important part of our discussion I think, was our brainstorms around what we can do to reduce these impacts individually as well as globally. Please note this obviously isn't an exhaustive list, but a great place to begin! The kids were surprised how much of a difference turning lights off as we leave a room or not having the tap running while we brush our teeth can make.