In September 2022, the beginning of the academic year, I began running an After School Club with primary children from the Ofsted outstanding Liphook Junior School. Since then the children have enthusiastically learnt about several poignant and relevant issues relating to the conservation of our beautiful planet, and along with what the school does already with their Green Team brainstorming ways in which we can protect and preserve the environment better, the children have expressed how much they have loved learning through the simple medium of colouring and drawing with me.
Here are some photos of hand-drawn sketches I did for the eight to nine-year-old children to colour in, along with some of their own artwork where I have taught them to sketch an animal or topic - say hedgehogs in hibernation - which they had fun painting with water colours. Climate Change is defined by the Young People's Trust for the Environment - YPTE - as, "the build-up of man-made gases in the atmosphere that traps the sun's heat, causing changes in the weather patterns' around the world." As a result of Climate Change, the arctic is warming 2-3 times faster than the rest of the world which means that glaciers along with the Greenland ice sheets are melting and increasing water volumes in our seas and oceans. As the sea level rises, flooding would affect eight of the world's largest cities positioned next to water; Tokyo, Mexico City, Mumbai, New York, Shanghai, Lagos, Los Angeles, Calcutta and Buenos Aires, and let's not forget that the UK is an island surrounded by water too and that London has the Thames river running through it. Just a little food for thought!
To learn more, visit Jane Goodall's Roots & Shoots at https://www.rootsnshoots.org.uk/.
