Activities for The Great Big Green Week
This year we’re supporting The Great Big Green Week once again to inspire pupils to learn more about climate change.
What is The Great Big Green Week?
The Great Big Green Week is an annual event, which celebrates action against climate change. It is run by the Climate Coalition and this year takes place between the 8th and 16th June.
The theme this time around is “Let’s swap together for good”. Its aim is to encourage people to choose alternatives that are better for the environment, celebrate them and inspire others to change too. The swaps can be anything, from schools moving from gas to solar energy for their heating needs, to families deciding to sell clothes they have finished with instead of sending them to landfill.
To support the event and help you teach about climate change, Busy Things:
a) Has created a free activity pack, which includes paper-based versions of some of our online activities, as well as some new ones. It:
- provides information about the week,
- highlights climate change issues in the Amazon and the UK,
- looks at burning coal to create electricity,
- considers consumer choices and their impact on climate change, and
- invites your pupils to think about how we can tackle the crisis.
Access your free activity pack here!
b) Is making some of its games free to play without logging in to Busy Things. These can be found below. To play them, simply click on the link and the game will load.
What can you do for The Great Big Green Week?
Busy Things has some great climate change resources, which it’s developed with The Climate Coalition. Below you’ll find a selection of them:
Climate change – The issues
Our Climate change around the world (Jigsaws) activity, which looks at Bangladesh, Africa, areas with rainforest, island nations and the UK, is great for giving children a quick summary of the issues that climate change is causing globally.
Play it here!
The completed one below is the one focusing on the rainforest. The children are given pieces to create the picture, and once done, the facts appear to explain what is shown.
Climate change – What could a swap be?
Swap idea 1: Walk instead of using the car for certain journeys
Petrol and diesel cars emit carbon dioxide in their exhaust fumes, so contribute to climate change.
By walking, you’ll be lowering the CO2 emissions.
If everyone decided to walk to the local shops instead of driving, the impact would be huge!
Swap idea 2: Choose renewable energy sources to power your school
As of 2019, just 10% of the UK’s electricity was generated using renewable sources.
Play our Generating green electricity jigsaw activity here to reveal those sources.
Complete the jigsaws about each source to uncover facts about each.
Would any of them be possible for your school?
Swap idea 3: Swap wasted outdoor space for a bio-diverse area dedicated to wildlife
Do you have an area at school that is just wasteland?
Perhaps you could plant some trees in it to reduce CO2?
Perhaps you could encourage wildflowers to grow there to boost its biodiversity?
Swap idea 4: Swap one cooked dinner option for a plant-based one
Being vegan is better for the planet because cultivating plants requires less energy and produces less emissions than farming animal products.
Do your pupils know which foods are vegan and which not? Why not sort them as a group on the whiteboard?
You’ll find the activity here.
Your pupils might also want to look at reducing their family’s carbon footprint. For this, you can get some ideas from our climate change activity ideas page.
And if we don’t make changes?
For climate change to be reversed, swaps do need to be made somewhere, but what if we carry on as we are?
This is where Busy Things’ recently updated simulator game, Tree World, comes into its own as children can build houses, keep warm by the fire and eat a meat-based diet as we traditionally have, and see the environmental disasters like storms and forest fires unfold.
Alternatively, they can make swaps like the ones proposed above, live more sustainably and see the benefits for the Beeples, Berbs and the planet as a whole.
Summary
We hope this blog and its activities helps you to explore climate change with your pupils, appreciate its full impact and think about what we can all do to improve the situation. We’d love it if you took advantage of our free-to-play activities (Climate change around the world jigsaw, Generating green electricity, Vegan or non-vegan and Tree World) and FREE paper-based topical pack for The Great Big Green Week.
If you’d like to access our climate change activities (and activities in other areas of the curriculum too!), we’d be happy to offer you a 28-day free trial. Simply click here to get yourself a login!
This blog post was updated in May 2024.