Wondering how to connect the Ontario EcoSchools program to your teaching practice? Our new curriculum-connected resource is designed to help schools build environmental learning into everyday activities.
How do I use EcoSchools in Your Classroom?
Simply navigate to the appropriate grade level and subject area, then click on the tile to find out how to connect your teaching practice to the six sections of the Ontario EcoSchools program. Each tile in EcoSchools in Your Classroom includes the questions in the online application for which points can be claimed (e.g., Environmental Stewardship campaign, Questions 6.1 to 6.4).
What are the benefits of using this new resource?
We designed EcoSchools in Your Classroom to help all educators, regardless of their familiarity with the program, to see how their lessons and activities fit with our program – sometimes in unexpected ways.
This tool is particularly helpful for newly participating schools as it can be used as a roadmap to identify what you can claim in your application and where gaps exist. Ideally, this will help streamline and reduce the amount of work needed to plan additional activities or lessons.
One of the biggest benefits of using this resource is to get more members of your school community involved in filling in your online application. For example, if you’re an EcoTeam lead, share EcoSchools in Your Classroom with your colleagues and identify where they can step in according to the grade and subject they teach.
Now that you have an idea of how to use EcoSchools in Your Classroom, here are two examples from this new resource:
Grade 5 – Language: Connections to Teamwork and Leadership
Oral Communication
Overall Expectation: 2
Offer your students the opportunity to build leadership and communication skills. In class, have students create songs, announcements, and presentations about important environmental topics to share with your school through classroom presentations, PA announcements, and school assemblies.
At WRDSB’s Sandhills Public School grade five students created an EcoRap to perform to the school. “Nurture Nature every day, drinking water is one way / We can use the refill station, and that will stop us wastin’! / Plastic bottles, Plastic bottles, just say, “No!” / Plastic bottles, plastic bottles, let them go!
Claim this activity in Teamwork and Leadership, Q 1.5, 1.7.
Grade 12 – Social Sciences & Humanities: Connections to Environmental Stewardship
The Food Consumer
Overall Expectation: D2
Students in grade 12 can explore the benefits of choosing local foods. Through a school-wide campaign, complex issues such as responsible consumerism, can be unpacked and used as the context for environmental learning and action. Students can engage the broader school community with such initiatives as promoting The Great Big Crunch, hosting a local food potluck, or coordinating a farmer’s market day.
Paris District High School (GEDSB), chose to engage the whole school community in a week of environmental actions in October. They kicked off this initiative with campaigns that were linked to local food issues and climate change. Meatless Monday encouraged staff and students to reduce their ecological footprint by choosing plant-based foods and, Tasty Tuesday promoted recipes that featured delicious local and organic ingredients.
Claim this campaign in Environmental Stewardship, Q6.1-6.4.
New! Curriculum 101 video
We are also pleased to share our Curriculum video, filmed with École secondaire Ronald Marion in Pickering (CSViamonde). Find out how Grade 9 students explored the impact of human behaviours on biodiversity by conducting a water quality assessment on a local waterway. This video also offers general tips on fostering learning in, about, and for the environment to support the Curriculum section of your online application.
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