Methodological Guide on Environmental Sustainability Methodological_Guide | Page 17

Strategic Partnership Project (Key action no 2)
“ACTIVE CITIZENSHIP AND ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS THROUGH FORMAL
AND NON-FORMAL EDUCATION” (ACEAFNE)
Give them a time limit of 3 minutes.
3/ “Plastic Sea” (30 minutes)
Put a long piece of plastic material on the floor (if possible, transparent – e.g. a plastic material
used for covering furniture before painting, alternatively you can use a large piece of cloth or
paper), which will symbolize the sea. If you have more than 15 students, we recommend that you
make two plastic seas. Start with the following instructions:
We have just seen photos from the sea, which is quite far from us. Therefore, now we will create a
small sea in this classroom. It will be a special sea, the plastic sea – made of plastic bags, bottles
or other similar materials.What do you think this sea would look like? What could live in such a
sea? Use your imagination, draw your ideas on any plastic or other material available and then
cut them out and stick them in the sea. You can work individually or in small groups. It is up to
you.The creatures living in the “Plastic Sea” can be both invented and real-life.
4/ Class discussion (5 minutes)
The aim of this is to help students reflect on the previous creative activity and, more importantly,
to try to imagine the impacts that water pollution and plastic waste has on the sea and on the living
creatures in it:
What names would you give to the creatures in the sea?What do you think it is like to live in such a
sea?What do you think the mood of this sea is?How could it feel?
Follow-up (20 minutes)
1/ Personal journal (5 minutes)
Students reflect their work first:
How was it for you to cooperate with others when creating the “Plastic Sea”? What would you do
differently next time and why?
After that, return to the issue of plastic waste in the sea and stress that the amount of plastic waste
in the sea is growing continuously and that it has become a global problem. Write the following
questions on the board and give students a couple of minutes to answer them into their journals:
What can be done about the plastic waste in the sea? Is there something that we could do about it?
Then ask volunteers to share their ideas on how to solve the problem.
2/ Diamond activity (15 minutes)
Divide students into groups. The instructions are:
Now we will talk about what can be done about the plastic waste before it reaches the sea. What
can we do with our plastic bags? Each group will get 9 different ideas how to reduce or solve this
problem and the task is to think about each of them, discuss them and then rank them according to
how efficient you think they are. For this, we will use the shape of diamond.
Draw the diamond on the board, each line represents
one solution (place for one card):
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