Celebrating Earth Hour
Lessons, starters, activities and ideas to help spread the word about Earth Hour!
Every year towards the end March, millions of people around the world turn their lights off for one hour to raise awareness of how we use our resources and their effect on the environment. This movement, started in Australia by WWF, is now supported in over 185 countries worldwide. So, to celebrate and show support for Earth Hour, we have brought together a selection of resources to raise your learners' awareness of the environment and get them excited to spend an hour by candlelight.
Primary resources
Earth Hour Taster Activity
This activity encourages pupils to make the links between their own actions and the future of our planet. After
thinking about the ways in which they are able to enjoy the ‘great outdoors’ they make a promise to take one
step to protect the Earth.
Teachers can access WWF’s full range of FREE classroom resources and tools for their green teams by registering here https://wwfschoolsscheme.education.co.uk/
Earth Hour
This resource is a fully editable and informative 80-slide PowerPoint presentation on Earth Hour. The resource contains references to:
- The History of Earth Hour
- The Greenhouse Effect
- The Causes of Global Warming and Climate Change
- The Effects of Global Warming and Climate Change
- The United Nations Climate Conference
- The Work of the World Wide Fund for Nature
- Earth Hour
- The Future
The PowerPoint contains hyperlinks to a 5-minute video on Hurricane Katrina.
Simple Text Earth Day Presentation
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Focus on Climate Change scheme of work
Focus on Climate change is a Primary cross-curricular scheme of work. Additional presentations and worksheets associated with this scheme can be found at http://www.cafod.org.uk/primary/climate-environment
The only one we've got - An Earth poem
Secondary resources
Analysing Adverts - Earth Hour
Earth Hour is a worldwide movement organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). The event is held annually encouraging individuals, communities, and businesses to turn off non-essential electric lights for one hour, from 8:30 to 9:30 pm on a specific day towards the end of March, as a symbol of commitment to the planet.
A lesson which looks at Earth Hour and its purpose.
It starts with a discussion on Earth Hour’s most recent advert with all the slogans/logos removed. It then moves on to a discussion of the purpose of Earth Hour.
Students then discuss what makes an advert effective and look at two recent examples from Earth Hour.
The final task is to design an advert for Earth Hour which can be displayed around your school.
This could be used either as a form lesson (with the focus on the environment) or an English lesson (with the focus being adverts and their design).
WWF's Earth Hour - UK highlights
WWF's Earth Hour - the global deal
Earth Hour 2018 Lesson Plan
A 3 part lesson for PSHE which involves :
Students learning about Earth Hour & Climate Change
Tutors and students being creative by doing an activity that doesn’t involve using electricty
An active Citizenship plenary where students get involved in a mulitude of campaiging (will need tweaking for your organisation)
