Nurture Our Environment with a Sustainability Assembly
There’s no better way to celebrate World Environmental Health Day than with a sustainability assembly packed with engaging activities and thought-provoking songs. With youth icons such as Greta Thunberg making a stand against climate change, children are more eager than ever to contribute to a sustainable society, but how do we broach environmental issues with primary school students?
In this guide, we will offer our advice for creating an effective and appropriate sustainability assembly, from our ideas on what to include and how to structure your assembly, to suggestions of school musicals with sustainable themes as an alternative to an eco-assembly.
Ideas for Running a Sustainability Assembly
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Pick your learning objectives
Before you begin planning your World Environment Day assembly, it is useful to have some learning objectives in mind to ensure your assembly has a clear focus. Here are some examples of key objectives that no sustainability assembly should be without:
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Understand the importance of sustainability
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Reflect on our own environmental impact
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Think about how we can be sustainable in our own lives
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Encourage your students to be kind to the planet
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Develop your students’ responsibility skills
Once you have settled on your aims, it will be much easier to come up with environment assembly ideas that will inspire your students, while teaching them all the right lessons.
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Plan sustainability assembly activities
When you are running a sustainability assembly for KS2 or KS1 students, it is important to devise several activities that will allow your students to engage with sustainability on a personal level, while thinking about how they can start caring for the environment. We have included some of our own ideas for environment assembly activities to get you started:
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Recycling activity: Create a pile of recyclable rubbish, such as cardboard boxes and plastic bottles, then invite your students to sort through the rubbish and place the items into their corresponding recyclable bins. This not only gives your students practical experience with sorting recyclables, but also develops their organisational skills.
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Littering discussion: Ask your students to offer their ideas on how littering negatively impacts the environment, using relevant pictures to prompt their answers. This will strengthen your students’ understanding of sustainability and its importance, while allowing them to develop their reasoning skills.
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Share sustainability ideas: Ask your students to share the ways in which they are already being sustainable, while encouraging them to invent new ways in which they could care for the environment. This is an excellent exercise for developing your students’ creative resolution skills while allowing them to take ownership of their contributions to a more sustainable society.
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Read environmental poetry: Collectively reading a piece of poetry about the environment, or giving your students the time to write and then share their own poems about sustainability, gives you the opportunity to test their reading, writing and communication skills.
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Share powerful pictures and videos
As we mentioned above, including pictures in your sustainability assembly is an effective way to aid your students’ understanding of their environmental impact. Meanwhile, showing emotive videos to your students is sure to leave an impression that should hopefully stay with them long after your environmental assembly is over, inspiring them to put what they have learnt into practice.
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Incorporate sustainability assembly songs
Nothing brings people together like music, so to foster a sense of community during your sustainability assembly, we recommend interspersing your activities with some memorable and meaningful assembly songs.
Our collection of Earth Day Assembly songs contains some joyous numbers that will deepen your students’ appreciation of the world around them, as well as impress the urgency of taking action to protect it. As many of these songs are taken from our KS2 school musicals, you might consider staging an excerpt or the entire performance for an eco-assembly extravaganza!
Listen to our standalone sustainability song, Our Beautiful World, below:
[Embed ‘Our Beautiful World – School Assembly Sing Along’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSLJZCkFxlU]
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Finish with a moral message
As your sustainability assembly draws to a close, drive your moral message home with a closing statement that encapsulates the central theme of your assembly. Summarising the points you raised throughout the assembly is an effective way to ensure they stick in your students’ minds, while encouraging them to practice sustainability in the coming days or weeks will empower your students to practice what they have learnt in their own lives.
School Musicals with a Sustainability Theme
Want to make your World Environment Day assembly one to remember? Rather than limit yourself to a few songs, you could stage a school musical packed with sustainable themes to emphasise your environmental message.
Check out our sustainability-inspired school musicals below:
In this swashbuckling adventure from Nicki Davies, Captain Clingfilm and his crew aboard The Plastic Pearl are forced to come to terms with the impact that their plastic pillaging is having on the sea and its creatures. While the antics of the pirate crew offer a wry look at the issue of plastic littering our oceans, the serious tone of the song Plastic Soup highlights the urgency with which the fictional pirates and real-world audience must act to reverse this environmental damage.
After participating in their own sustainability assembly, a group of school children persuade a local farmer to let them plant wild flowers on his spare land, much to the dismay of his scarecrows. In addition to celebrating biodiversity in the grand opening number, Our Wonderful World, Nicki Davies brings attention to the positive impact mankind can have on the natural world, showcasing the benefits of rewilding in the appropriately 70s inspired song, Flower Power.
Produced in collaboration with Edinburgh Zoo, the Royal Zoological Society and the Beyond the Panda programme, this globe-trotting musical tells the story of Yun Zi, a male panda being flown from China to Scotland to join their resident female, Mei Sheng. While the importance of conservation is at the heart of this musical, which writers Tom Kirkham and Matthew Crossey effectively capture in their song Conservation Conversation, the musical equally highlights the serenity of the natural world in its ode to Cairngorms National Park, Haven on Earth.
Ready to Put on Your Own Sustainability Assembly?
Whether you have been inspired to stage an environmental musical or you feel more inclined to incorporate songs into your sustainability assembly, we hope this article has given you some ideas for this World Environment Day!
For more information about running an eco-assembly, or for our insight into organising assemblies about kindness, friendship or courage for your students, please get in touch, and we would be happy to offer our insights.