Education for sustainability: new resource and activity kit for daycare and elementary settings
After a period of intensive testing, a new educational resource and activity kit on the topic of education for sustainability, with a focus on the sixth UN Sustainable Development Goal – “Ensure access to water and sanitation for all” - is off to elementary schools and daycare settings in the north German town of Norderstedt, with five kits available.
Working with the town’s municipal park, its utilities provider, and the IPN – Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN), the municipality of Norderstedt is launching an initiative to support young children in acquiring system thinking skills, in the specific context of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Ultimately, the program intends to provide children aged five to seven with opportunities to learn through play all about how they can think in systems and act sustainably toward these global aims, and to encourage even the very young to be aware of how our world interlinks and how vital sustainable development is to its future.
“Many of the issues addressed by the Sustainable Development Goals call for people to deploy scientific skills and develop a profound understanding of potential solutions to the associated challenges. Goal 6, which is all about water, is particularly suited to helping children aged five to seven to gain insights into system thinking centered on identifying solutions,” .
explains Prof. Dr. Ute Harms, head of the IPN’s Department of Biology Education, who is the project’s scientific lead
The guidelines issued by the state of Schleswig-Holstein on daycare settings’ educational role provide a practical rationale for the use of the new kit, which is free of charge to settings and supplies age-appropriate resources and activities for play and learning in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) that feature a real-world emphasis.
“Preschool daycare lays the foundations for a child’s education, and daycare staff are keen to carry out their educational role for all children. Our new kit is intended to provide specific support to busy daycare educators, who are performing their role in times of acute staff shortages, by giving them access to valuable resources and tools for early education,”
adds Ute Harms.
The academic expertise that has gone into the kit’s design ensures that it engages children at their developmental stage and takes account of the latest findings on supporting the acquisition of science skills among this group. The kit features interesting and inspiring activities and resources that can motivate preschool and early elementary school children to think about the Sustainable Development Goals they cover, and that can boost children’s confidence in their abilities and their curiosity for exploring new topics. It helps in this way to encourage even very young learners, in preschool and elementary school settings, to engage in scientific and sustainable thinking and actions.
The team behind the kit optimized it to meet the needs of early years education by carrying out a multi-stage testing and feedback process with the staff of three daycare centers in Norderstedt, Das Bunte Haus, Kita Falkenberg, and Kita Harkshörn; they can therefore be confident that the resources have been tried out in real settings.
As well as applying their scientific expertise to the resource and activity kit’s design, the IPN academics involved in the project are helping launch it to settings, providing free-of-charge training sessions, the first of which took place on November 13, 2024, in Norderstedt’s municipal museum. At the event, educators could learn about the kit’s contents and how they might use it, and also had an opportunity to view PÄDAGOGIEN, an exhibition on early education currently hosted at the museum.
Prof. Dr. Ute Harms pictured alongside the new resource and activity kit on education for sustainability at the first training event for potential users, November 13, 2024
The series of training events will undergo scientific evaluation on an ongoing basis, with the aim of continuously improving the kit and further planned editions and optimizing the process of putting them into use in settings. The IPN’s KiKo (Kitakoffer Bildung für Nachhaltigkeit) project team is already busy developing the next kits, which will center on the Sustainable Development Goals “Affordable and clean energy,” “Responsible consumption and production,” and “Zero hunger.”
Get in touch to find out more
If you work in a daycare or elementary school setting in the Norderstedt area and have questions on the training around the resource and activity kit or are interested in borrowing one of the kits for your setting, you can contact the sustainability team for the municipality of Norderstedt on 040 53595 333. Currently, the kits are only available for lending to settings in the Norderstedt area.
