New Year’s resolutions: 5 ways to save the Earth

This PSHE primary resource encourages children to think about their own impact on the environment and how they may reduce it as part of their New Year’s resolutions. Discover simple steps you can take around the home and in daily life to help the environment. How many litres of water could brushing your teeth with the tap running waste each year? How many years can it take for a plastic bag to fully disintegrate in landfill? How does palm oil production lead to deforestation?

Pupils will learn about the tradition of setting New Year’s resolutions — a fun way to teach kids how to set and work towards goal in our National Geographic Kids PSHE primary resource sheet.

The teaching resource can be used as a printed handout for each pupil to review and highlight key information, or for display on the interactive whiteboard for class discussion.

Activity: Ask children to discuss, as a class, the value of setting goals and how they can track their progress, such as a weekly star/reward chart, or a scheduled monthly review. Pupils could discuss in groups which of the 5 suggestions from the resource they think are the most important for helping the planet? Why?

Using this resource and our Sustainable living primary resourcechildren could list their 3 top wishes for: i) themselves; ii) their school; iii) the world. Thinking about these wishes, can the children come up with 3 top resolutions (actions that they will take) for the year ahead, devising a resolution related to i) themselves; ii) their behaviour in school; iii) helping the planet. How might they track their resolutions/goals?

N.B.The following information for mapping the resource documents to the school curriculum is specifically tailored to the English National Curriculum and Scottish Curriculum for Excellence. We are currently working to bring specifically tailored curriculum resource links for our other territories; including South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. If you have any queries about our upcoming curriculum resource links, please email: schools@ngkids.co.uk

This British values primary resource assists with promoting fundamental British values as part of SMSC (spiritual, moral, social and cultural development) in schools using the following OFSTED assessment criteria:

• It is expected that pupils should understand that while different people may hold different views about what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’

Through their provision of SMSC, schools should: 

encourage students to accept responsibility for their behaviour, show initiative, and to understand how they can contribute positively to the lives of those living and working in the locality of the school and to society more widely

As a Geography primary resource, these this resource assist with teaching the following Key Stage 2 Geography objectives from the National Curriculum:

Pupils should be taught: describe and understand key aspects of: physical geography, including: climate zones, biomes and vegetation belts, rivers, mountains, volcanoes and earthquakes, and the water cycle

Also see National Curriculum Key Stage 2 Science (Year 4) objective:

• recognise that environments can change and that this can sometimes pose dangers to living things.

This Geography primary resource assists with teaching the following Social Studies First level objective from the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence:

• By exploring climate zones around the world, I can compare and describe how climate affects living things.

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