Roses with papers, spiders with wool scraps, puppets with socks, vases with empty jars or music instruments are gifts that we can make to our friends in their birthdays and save money at the same time. In addition, we will work on our creativity skills, make sustainable and environmental gifts and use  recyclable materials that we thought were useless.

you know that a cotton t-shirt cost 2.000 litres of water? An amount sufficient for a person to drink fo more than 900 days.  And what about some sneakers?For this, we need 4,400 liters. So instead of giving as a present bags, t-shirts or sneakers, why not give  to our beloved friend  something  that we made with our own hands?

Here are ideas for green and sustainable gifts to make in class:

Do you like painting, sewing or drawing?

There are hobbies that can be compatible with that cool idea that you have in your head for your best friend.

1.-Is your friend a fan of colored pencils and markers and never finds them at home? So take toilet paper rolls, card stock, glue, and cardboard and make an organizer for her study table. Here is this explanatory video

2.- Do you like art  and your friend doesn’t know how to decorate his room? Give her a painting made with shapes such as bottles, forks, leaves, lemons, or stoppers.

 3.- Or we can build a pirate ship A carton of eggs.

• Long, thin sticks.

• Folios in two different colors.

• Scissors.

• Pirate theme stickers.

• Small dolls (optional).

Paint and brush

 4.-And if you want to keep your savings and you don’t know where, make a  piggy bank!

 Or maybe your friend would like to be a musician and play drums. Make him a drum!

In pinteres you can find thousands of ideas!

This didactic proposal is based on the educational value of Environmental education, paying special attention to such an important, valuable and limited resource as water. It is aimed at students in the second cycle of Primary  Education with the aim of creating awareness and promoting strategies to take care of the water in our daily lives.  We are used to letting the tap run when we brush our teeth or when we wash the dishes, or even to leave the tap running while the water heats up when we go to take a shower. Do you know what we could do with that water? Have you ever considered that it could be used to drink in case of shortage, to water plants or mop the floor? Do you know how many kilometers some children have to walk to find drinking water?

Objectives

• Raise awareness regarding water use
• Reflect on how we could save water in our day to day
• Know the accessibility of water in other places
• Communicate through verbal and non-verbal language
• Develop imagination
• Work as a team and develop a spirit of solidarity
• Work on creativity
• Learning strategies of how to take care of limited resources in Earth

Contents

• Learn new vocabulary related to water and nature
• Grammatical structures: Water is important for, I should and I shouldn’t
• Practice numbers in English
• Learn the concept of water footprint

Activities

• Session 1: Assembly: How can we save water?
• Video: The water is important ?
• After that, the teacher split up the class into a group of 4 students. The pupils will make a brainstorming, suggesting  ideas of how can they save water in their daily lives.
• Later, they will  make a mind map
• Session 2 and 3: Children read a dialogue text.
• Later, they highlight the vocabulary they don’t know such as water pollution, waste or chemicals and some expressions.
• They will adapt the dialogue to have a role play in the classroom.
• Session 4: Good or bad?
• Students will have a card with actions related to the use of water in our daily lives such as 1.-take a shorter shower, 2.- leave the tap running meanwhile brushing my teeth, 3.-chose a shorter program for the washing machine, 4.-put in the laundry basket my clothes when I just used it once. They will classify the cards on the blackboard using I should or i shouldn’t
• Later, they will write these sentences on their notebooks
• Session 5: What is the water footprint and how much water do we need to make a t-shirt or to feed a cow and eat a good beaf steak?
• The students will play a game in which they have to put labels  with numbers on the different objects they have brought to the classroom such as oranges, t-shirts, jeans, sneakers a slide of bread and say how much water they think is have been used to make food or textile.
• They will practice numbers in English as well
• Session 6: Children calculate the water footprint
• Session 7: Kahoot to practice vocabulary and structures from the unit
• Session 8: Children will explain their mind maps
• Mindfulness class

Searching and googling for environmental resources online, I came across this morning with a practical and useful website called Kids Environment which is well-designed and has  a wide range of different topic regarding to environmental contents. You have  just to scroll down the main window called TOPICS and some others smaller tabs will come up on your screen with some  ecological issues such as pollution, reuse and recycle, the natural world, climate change or environment and health. Besides, the website offers good resources, educational material, activities and games to learn other English contents.

Internet presents many resources and games that can be adapted for our English class to work on ecological values. Here I leave you this link in which there are games to create conscious and respectful children. For example, teachers can find sensory and creative games, scientific games, games to save water or games to know how to recycle.

Games to work body language, feelings and emotions

Imitate the sound of the wind with your breath.

Simulate the flapping of the birds with the movement of the arms.

Move at the speed at which some animals move.

Compare silence in nature with that at home.

Play with the footprint that the body leaves on the sand.

Observe the waves that are produced when touching the water.

Games that can be adapted to learn the importance of water

Children must understand that water is the most precious and scarce resource on the planet.

Not using the cistern as a wastebasket, showering instead of bathing or turning off the tap while brushing our teeth are small habits that they will only acquire if they see them in us.

There are simple games that we can introduce into our daily routine, such as incorporating a water meter in the shower to control what we spend.

The reuse of water that we do not really use (such as the first one that comes out before heating) for other needs (watering the plants, rinsing the dishes …) can be a family achievement and a reason for celebration every time savings increase.

My green energy planet sponsored by WWF and the AXA Foundation have launched an online game to promote renewable energy by choosing appropriate ways of life and respecting the environment.

Generation awake, powered by the European Union is an iniciative full of resources to train smart and responsible consumers. I would highlight the section dedicated to short animated films really attractive and appealing to children.

On the other hand, Desembasura is a mobile phone application that allows you to send photos of those places full of waste to show them on the map and report them. You can download it fro free from the app store.“Your smartphone will geolocate you, if you come across a black point, describe what you are seeing and take a photo of it. Thus, automatically, the waste point will be visible on the map “.

In addition, we can find really interesting online games to work on ecological values meanwhile children develops IT competence and Science competente. In this website called Plum Landing students can build up their own ecosystem, make a water safari or observe which animals are in danger in a concrete habitat. 

Using Environmental Education as a conducting vehicle to work on the contents of the English Foreign Language classroom in a Primary Education might be a useful resource.

I present a wide variety of activities programmed in a Didactic Unit where transversal contents, communicative approach and  constructivist  learning are integrated. At the same time, receptive skills (listening and reading comprehension) and productive skills (oral and written production) are worked throughout the  different activities .

Therefore, this Didactic Unit includes Environmental Education contents and contents of the Foreign Language  classroom itself using different methodologies that facilitate teaching-learning process (Learning based on games, cooperative learning or CLIL).

I link you a power point with a UDI called Save the planet  made of myself, which is aimed at the 5th  course of Primary Education and might be a guide for you as a teacher to work ecology as a transversal value.

In this sense, I think it is essential to a have clear idea of  the specific contents highlighted in the organic law of Education (LOMCE) regarding to the Primary curriculum and how to make an Integrated Didactic Unit taking into account the three basic elements:1.- The curricular concretion, 2.- The Didactic Transpostion and 3.- Learning assessment

Didactic Unit(UDI).

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