Lessons about microplastics
Children in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu are learning about microplastic pollution. The NGO WasteLess is teaching students in some 200 schools how they can help safeguard the oceans. The Sea Change program is also designed to be fun.
Transcript
00:00 Finally, a gripping school book packed with pictures and stories.
00:06 Young students in India's state of Tamil Nadu are learning about marine life in a fun way.
00:12 But the subject is deadly serious.
00:15 Animals like this sea turtle are at risk from fishing nets and plastic.
00:22 An estimated 11 million tonnes of plastic enter our oceans each year.
00:28 So what can we do?
00:30 Indian based NGO Wasteless has designed school lessons about plastic pollution.
00:41 What we do in Wasteless is we have designed a curriculum on waste and waste management
00:47 and we are teaching it to children.
00:50 The age group we choose is 10 to 13 from classes 6 to 8.
00:56 They already knew about the water cycle, water becomes vapour due to heat, becomes clouds
01:00 then becomes cold and falls down as rain.
01:04 They all explained it well.
01:06 What we wanted to teach them was the plastics we use in our daily life also follows a similar
01:11 cycle.
01:12 How water follows a cycle, plastic also goes through a cycle.
01:17 We wanted to teach them this.
01:25 We planned the curriculum in a way that it is not too textbook oriented.
01:29 We wanted there to be hands on activities and it to be experienced based.
01:39 Through experiments the children are taught how to find microplastics in everyday products.
01:51 One experiment is to find out if there are microplastics beads in face washes.
02:02 Learning using all their senses and their imagination, storytelling really captures
02:09 the children's attention.
02:12 What we came up with was a very creative way of stories.
02:18 We created these stories, these dialogues between two marine creatures or sea creatures.
02:24 There's the wise turtle and then there's the smart student starfish.
02:28 And they're having a discussion.
02:29 So all the scientific content that we're talking about, a microplastic cycle, why do fish eat
02:35 microplastics and not plankton, this is all put in a story.
02:38 So every lesson the story continues and students are able to also read the story, the teacher
02:44 can read it with the student or both of them.
02:47 The Sea Change Program has been developed in cooperation with Tamil Nadu school authorities.
02:53 Through the Sea Change Program we created at Wasteless, this is one of the first times
02:58 in the world students are learning about microplastic pollution in a school.
03:03 This program has been implemented in government schools in three districts of Tamil Nadu.
03:09 It reaches over 10,000 students in nearly 200 government schools.
03:16 Pollution will shape the future.
03:18 The Wasteless team believes that this curriculum will teach them why it is important to slash
03:24 plastic pollution and how to do it.