Workshop: Environment Education in our School
Facilitator: Kavita Kumar, Bombay Natural History Society
The Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) is one of the largest non-governmental organizations in India engaged in conservation and biodiversity research. It supports many research efforts through grants, and publishes the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society.
Participants were asked to design a game for imparting environmental education, bearing in mind the theme, age group, group size, space available, time available, and resources available. For this exercise, the age group was 10-12 years, and the group size was 25 children.
- Divide the children in two groups and ask them to stand in a row. Each row will have a bucket of water in front and an empty bucket at the end. The group is supposed to dip a sponge in the water and pass it to the other members to fill out the empty bucket. The group that finished the first will win. The game shows how water is wasted in the daily chores.
- Design an environmental snakes and ladders board game with recycled material, using clay to make the dice. The children will get to climb up the ladder when they land on statements that are on saving the environment and will be bitten by a snake when they land on statements that describe environmental hazards.
- Ask children to sit in a circle and play the number game, where they start counting from one and on multiples of five they give examples of saving the environment.
- Assign every child a component of nature, such as an animal, water, a flower, or an insect. Pass a roll of string to a child, who then passes it to another child whose nature component is related to his or her own in some way. As children continue to pass the string in this way, an interconnected web is created. Then, cut the string from a point, eliminating one component of nature, and see how all the other links are affected. This shows how nature is interlinked and a hazard to one part is, in some way, also hazard to the other.
- For pre-primary students, play musical chairs where children become trees instead of chairs and the other participants are birds. When the music starts, children run around the trees, and when it stops, they are supposed to hold on to the branches (hands) of the trees. At regular intervals, the trees are cut off and the birds start dying. This game helps children understand the importance of trees in our surroundings.
