After six years of training more than 124,000 students, the Ecoembes project welcomes teachers at these educational levels who wish to incorporate environmental and sustainability education into their classrooms.
The Naturaliza Library, which already has more than 140 free educational proposals, will add new materials designed specifically for Early Childhood and Special Education.
Key concepts such as drought, deforestation, climate change, pollution and litter are already part of the vocabulary of more than 124,000 primary school students thanks to Naturaliza, the Ecoembes project launched in 2018 with the aim of bringing environmental education to classrooms and the natural environment.
After six years in which more than 2,700 teachers from 1,750 schools in Spain have joined the Naturaliza network, the project is taking a step forward and bringing an environmental perspective to Early Childhood and Special Education centres. In this way, teachers at these educational levels who want to integrate the environment and sustainability in a transversal way in their classes will be able to do so starting in the 2024-2025 school year.
To this end, they will have free access to the School of Teachers and to materials designed to work with students in Early Childhood and Special Education. Thus, in addition to the more than 140 proposals available in the Naturaliza Library, nine more will be added (three per course) for the second cycle of Early Childhood Education and three for Special Education, all of them in 30-minute sessions designed and adapted in duration and methodologies to these levels.
Helena Astorga, spokesperson for Naturaliza, points out that “education can no longer be understood without an environmental perspective, as it is a key aspect to move towards a more circular, green and fair world. At Naturaliza, we work to integrate it into the education sector with the aim of ensuring that children have the necessary tools to take care of our planet. Furthermore, aware that caring for the environment is everyone’s responsibility, this new school year we are adding Early Childhood and Special Education to our programme.”
At the moment, Naturaliza has three types of proposals for Primary Education: double sessions to work in the classroom in two 50-minute class periods, quarterly projects with different sessions throughout the quarter, and classes outside the classroom to use the natural environment. This last proposal is especially relevant because Naturaliza seeks to bring the environment into the classroom and take the classroom out into the environment. It is proposed to use outdoor spaces such as the playground, the school garden, a park or a natural environment close to the center to develop basic knowledge of the different areas.
In the coming years, the Ecoembes project will continue to expand this Library with new resources and proposals so that teachers at different educational levels have more and more tools to integrate the environmental perspective in their classrooms.
To join Naturaliza, simply register for free on the project website.
Naturaliza, active environmental learning, is the Ecoembes project that aims to promote environmental education in the educational system. It offers training and resources to primary school teachers so that they can introduce the environment into the classroom in a cross-curricular way in subjects such as Mathematics, Spanish Language and Literature, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences. It also promotes outdoor learning through proposals for teaching classes in the natural environment. More than 2,700 teachers from 1,750 schools in Spain are already part of the Naturaliza network.