Get ready for Earth Hour & Earth Day!
This year Earth Hour will take place on Saturday 28th March at 8:30pm. This annual event, organised by WWF, invites everyone to switch off the lights for an hour to show symbolic support for the planet and to raise awareness of the environmental issues affecting it.
We think this presents an excellent opportunity to show your students that small changes can make a big difference, so we are encouraging all our schools to run a switch-off event.
Our switch off programme includes loads of advice and useful resources, including:
- Checklists to help students and staff ensure that everything gets switched off for the holidays.
- Classroom switch off lists to help you ensure that energy is not being wasted during break, after school and at weekends.
You could either do this the Friday before (why not try teaching in the dark to create a learning moment?), or you could go a step further and make sure you switch everything off for the whole of the Easter break.
You can then task a group of students – perhaps your eco-team – to look at your energy data and present the results to the whole school at assembly.
Take a look at our blog post for details on how to check your savings after the holiday.
Put your school on the map…literally
We suggest that an ideal time to present your results back to the school would be ahead of Earth Day, which takes place on Wednesday 22nd April.
You can register your school’s activity on the Earth Day map (screenshot below) for a visual representation of the power of collective action.
Image credit: EarthDay.org
To help you get your students warmed up, we have put together a fun game (see links below) which you can run at assembly or with your eco-club or class. You might prefer to do this before you switch off, or you may want to include it as part of your presentation when you report the results back to your school.
PLAY THE GAME – primary schools
PLAY THE GAME – secondary schools
If your school has an Energy Sparks account, you can also sign in and record your Earth Day activity on our website to collect points towards our scoreboard competition. We’d love to see pictures of what you get up to!
Learn more
For more information about Earth Hour, visit: www.earthhour.org
To learn more about Earth Day, and to register your school’s activity, visit: earthday.org
