UN's sustainable development goals
Three reasons why teaching young children the UN's Sustainable Development Goals is so important
Around 25 percent of the global population is under 15 years of age – a staggeringly large proportion of today’s society. As sustainability climbs up the global agenda, we must ensure that this younger generation is equipped with the knowledge and ability to recognise and solve the problems of both today and tomorrow to build a better world.
At ACS Cobham, one of our school-wide learning objectives is to foster students who are effective learners, confident individuals, and caring contributors; we have found the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be invaluable in helping us to achieve this.
We have embedded all 17 of the SDGs across our entire Early Childhood and Lower School curriculum, for all children from the age of two. There are three reasons why we believe that teaching the UN’s SDGs are so beneficial for younger children.
Understanding the Bigger Picture
The SDGs offer a springboard for children to develop empathy and understand that there are similarities and differences in where we live. One way to facilitate this is by encouraging children to compare their own experiences with their fellow classmates who may come from both the UK and all over the world, and this helps them to understand that we all have our own set of cultures, experiences, and celebrations that are important to each of us.
We also make the most of our international student body to help younger children to understand our impact on the planet. For example, when we studied the impact of deforestation on local wildlife, we encouraged one of our students from Brazil to show their class photos of animals that they had seen themselves in the rainforest. This demonstrates to the children that they all have different experiences of these issues and that everyone’s voice needs to be heard.
Forming the Foundation to Become Global Citizens
Increasingly so, we all need to be more aware of the impact of our own actions on the planet and other societies around the world, and the SDGs provide a useful lens through which children can explore the bigger picture. For example, this year at ACS Cobham, we linked our ‘Rainforests’ topic to the ‘Life on Land’ SDG. The children discovered how to identify a rainforest, why they are so important, and what animals and plants live there. To help the children visualise the project, we worked collaboratively to construct all the different layers of a rainforest and built an enormous display in our classroom. This learning was then brought to life through technology and augmented reality (AR), with children exploring a different layer of the rainforest on their iPad each week to view the impact different forms of wildlife have on the ecosystem. All of this helps younger children to learn about the positive and negative impacts that humans can have on the environment, ensuring that they are conscious of the world around them and potentially inspire them to act as a catalyst for change.
Inspiring the Next Generation to Take Action
Rather than solely imparting knowledge to children, we also harness the SDGs to present real-life situations to our children and encourage them to question what they're learning and consider how this relates to themselves and others. We facilitate this by first discussing what they know already about certain global issues, how they feel about it and what their response to this issue might be. For example, while many children might struggle to comprehend the scale of global warming, we encourage them to think instead about how they can care for local wildlife, reduce or reuse their waste, or minimise their energy consumption at home.
By encouraging this inquisitive mindset from a young age, it becomes embedded into how children think and respond to different situations throughout their lives both in and outside the classroom. We’ve seen the direct impact of this in our own students, who are already becoming those caring contributors that we need in the world. Our pupils all love the idea that they too can be “planet protectors” and often clean up rubbish that they see in the school grounds, as well as wanting to protect animal habitats. In lessons, many now know how to recycle and have started to ask us how they can reuse their waste rather than throwing it away, and the majority of classes take their food waste to the school composter. One of our school parents even commented to us that at home, their daughter “now makes sure all our lights and electronic devices are off when unused so we are helping the world.”
By embedding the SDGs into children’s education from a young age, we have the exciting opportunity to lay the foundations to nurture engaged individuals who will go on to become caring and responsible global citizens in their lives, and capable of making their mark on the world.
