#EarthDay was celebrated on 22 April 2021. The theme for 2021 is ‘Restore Our Earth™’, which focuses on natural processes, emerging green technologies, and innovative thinking that can restore the world’s ecosystems.
This fits in nicely with the Grade 3 Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) theme for this term – “Why are we so wasteful?” They will be exploring the different ways humans waste, and how this impacts the environment. They will also then investigate the endangered sea turtle and Knysna Seahorses and how they are suffering due to human plastic products. The Grade 3s strive to be plastic-free by the end of the project!
IBL is Student-centered learning, which puts the ball back in the children’s court and allows them to develop a growth mindset, learn from failures or mistakes and learn at their own level of understanding and pace, setting them up with skills they can use throughout their learning and in all areas of life. This child-centered approach is becoming popular in many parts of the world. It is high time that education be updated and modernised from the traditional “chalk and talk” teaching style, particularly as we are educating children who will be living and working in a world that is very different from that of our grandparents. The current Global Pandemic has shown us that we can change and adapt how we do school and we can draw inspiration and motivation from this to rethink teaching and learning.
This kind of learning integrates school subjects in order to allow the children to look at the Big Question from a number of different angles. We combine Natural Science and Technology, History, Geography and Life Orientation. They become one new subject which we call IBL and we dedicate up to eight hours a week to it.
