At-home and at school learning resources from Learning for a Sustainable Future
Week 11: Climate Change and SDG 3 Good Health and Well Being
The World Health Organization has described climate change as the biggest threat in the 21st century. Climate Change affects our health and well-being in many different ways. Extreme changes in the weather and environment can increase existing health problems or create new ones. Heatwaves, wildfires, food quality and mental health are ways climate change may affect our health and well-being through the effects of air pollution, the spread of infectious diseases, threats to food and water quality and our mental health. There are many ways you can help slow or reduce climate change, which will also benefit your health. Changing to active transportation, eating plant-based foods, reducing the amount of processed and packaged foods you eat to minimize the amount of waste going to the landfill.

In this week's edition of Learning Inside Out, we focus on SDG 3 and Climate Change. We are sharing simple actions you and your students can take to reduce your impact on climate change while improving your health.
The Sustainable Happiness resource illustrates the link between happiness and sustainability. It promotes the fact that we are connected to one another and the natural environment and that our mutual well-being depends on these interconnections. The lesson plans educate students regarding the relationship between happiness, well-being and sustainability. The activities promote happiness as a means of connecting with other people, other species, and the natural environment. It teaches students that our daily actions and decisions contribute to or affect our own well-being and that of others around us. 



Activities
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Grades 4-6
Each year millions of children suffer as a result of inadequate access to clean water. This resource will guide you to deliver a hands-on inquiry-based STEM project, challenging your students to find a real solution to a global problem. The Stop the Spread challenge focuses on improving hygiene to reduce the spread of infectious diseases. For this challenge, pupils will work in teams to build a handwashing model and produce educational materials suitable for Kenya's primary school children.


Activities
  • Have students complete the Stop the Spread Stem handwashing model activity. Working as a team or individually, students design, build, and test a handwashing model that can capture and dispense water for handwashing. Use the Designing your Model worksheet to get students started 
  • Learn more about COVID-19 and what you can do to protect yourself. Use this worksheet to explain how each action can help prevent the spread of coronavirus
  • Try these simple outdoor ideas to demonstrate COVID-19 viral transmission and how we can keep it down. Activity two should be adapted to avoid students shaking hands
  • Peace rocks are a great way to relax. Use the worksheet to have students reflect on peace either before or after decorating their rocks
  • Mindful walking is a great way to reconnect our minds with our bodies and get into the present. Get outdoors and increase calmness and connect with all of nature's beauty. Share your reflections from practicing mindful walking
  • Self-care is an integral part of wellness Self Care 101 shares tips and strategies to help you get through difficult situations
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Students learn about vectors and the spread of infectious diseases. They will develop hypotheses on how climate change may affect vectors, the pathogens they carry, and the diseases they spread. Students perform an experiment to model the transmission of vector-borne diseases and discuss how climate change may impact the spread of such diseases.



Activities
  • Have students view Climate Change and Health to learn how they can take action against climate change and improve their health
  • Get outside and play for Goal 3 Good Health & Well-Being After playing the game, discuss how you can promote and protect people's health around you? How you can help reach Good Health & Well-being in your community 
  • Complete the What's All the Buzz About activity which explains vector-borne diseases, how they are transmitted and how climate change affects transmission. This interactive activity models mosquitoes infecting people with the West Nile virus. Students also learn how climate change will affect both the vector and the host populations, and then they complete the experiment incorporating these aspects into the model
  • Learn how daily activities use natural resources and contribute to air pollution with Whirling, Swirling Air Pollution
  • Have students create an infographic showing the effects of climate change on our health. Have them choose a topic such as air pollution and carbon emissions, and incorporate the consequences and solutions into their infographic
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The video highlights a United Nations report that sheds light on how Covid-19 will impact the Sustainable Development Goals. These goals are vital to ending poverty, protecting the planet, and improving the lives of everyone by 2030. Around the world, progress towards good health and well-being, quality education, and gender equaltiy are being threatened by the pandemic.


Activities
  • Watch Climate Change and Health and learn how climate change affects our health and well being 
  • Explore the connections between coronavirus and climate change with this four-part inquiry lesson Exploring our World
  • Climate Change, Children and Youth provides a variety of easy to organize activities that address the links between climate change and the spread of infectious disease
  • Write a poem about the globalization of disease from the perspective of the disease itself. How does a disease native to one area of the world get to other regions of the world?
  • Take a tech break, try the Self-Care Challenge and find ways to relax your mind
  • Understand the importance of self-care and build your own self-care toolkit
  • Complete The Wheel of Well-Being and do a check-in to see who you are and how you feel
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About Learning Inside Out

Above you will find a selection of activities, broken down by various grade levels. These guides will be released weekly and archived on our Learning Inside Out page, so you can always access the full catalogue.

All activities have been modified from resources on our R4R database, simplified and adapted for both outdoor learning in the school yard or at-home as needed. The activity descriptions above should contain all the information and links that you need!

If you'd like to view the full original resource on R4R, including curriculum connections for every province/territory, click the activity title.

We want this guide to work for you, so your feedback is invaluable to us.
Use the feedback button at the bottom of this Guide, or email us at info@LSF-LST.ca. We would also love to see photos of students engaging in the activities, please e-mail us any pictures or videos you have!
Let us know how this helped your learning and teaching from home or at school indoors and (hopefully) outdoors and what you'd like to see more of by filling out our brief feedback form!
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Please share widely with any parents and teachers in your life!
Learning for a Sustainable Future (LSF) is a Canadian charity with over 25 years of experience working within the education system. Our Resources for Rethinking (R4R) database is an award-winning collection of resources that are peer-reviewed by certified teachers and connected to curriculum in all provinces and territories. R4R is recommended on many Ministry of Education websites.
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