Curriculum Strategy

We worked with all the 6 schools in the ward to look at ways that they could with link the curriculum to reducing waste, be sustainable and use resources locally. There were separate projects linking learning for sustainability to the school’s curriculum across the 6 schools in the ward. Teachers also received training about how to incorporate learning for sustainability into their own teaching as part of our collaborative work with the schools in the ward.

By embedding learning into the curriculum, so it can be repeated and crosses the curriculum, we hoped to embed learning about sustainability into school life and we hope that it will ensure the next generation see reducing, reusing and recycling waste as a normal part of their daily behaviour and knowledge.

You can see specifically what we have done at each school by going to the ZWD Project Outcomes section on this website.  To give you an idea  of what we achieved we will focus on some specific examples here.

One of the first projects took place at Innerwick Primary School earlier in the year. The school had a whole school topic about World War Two. As part of this we assisted the school to teach the children how to darn and patch clothes and supported them to bring in older local residents to collect oral histories from them about what their lives were like as children around the time of the war. The children came up with the questions which focused on what life was like and on the relationship older residents had with resources and possessions when they were children. The pupils were genuinely shocked by some of the answers as it became clear that children back then had a lot less possessions than they do today.In some cases only having one toy for the whole of their childhood.

The resources to collect oral histories and to darn are now part of the community lending library at Sustaining Dunbar so that all the schools and the community can have access to them to aid further projects and learning like this. Lesson plans are also being uploaded to our website so that schools from both inside and outside the ward can duplicate the lessons to extend the learning to other schools.

Have a listen to some of the oral histories collected below.