Activity Introduction

Quick summary: Through the use of a flashcard game, students explore some of the reasons why saving energy is important for our environment. They begin to think about what actions they can take to save energy.

Key lessons and understandings of activity:

  • We need to use energy in our lives, but the less that we use the better for our environment.

Australian Curriculum Mapping

Content descriptions

Year 1 Science

  • People use science in their daily lives, including when caring for their environment and living things (ACSHE022)

Year 1 English

  • Engage in conversations and discussions, using active listening behaviours, showing interest, and contributing ideas, information and questions (ACELY1656)
  • Use comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning about key events, ideas and information in texts that they listen to, view and read by drawing on growing knowledge of context, text structures and language features (ACELY1660)

Year 2 Science

  • People use science in their daily lives, including when caring for their environment and living things (ACSHE035)

Year 2 English

  • Listen for specific purposes and information, including instructions, and extend students’ own and others’ ideas in discussions (ACELY1666)
  • Use comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning and begin to analyse texts by drawing on growing knowledge of context, language and visual features and print and multimodal text structures (ACELY1670)

Syllabus Outcomes: EN1-4A, EN1-1A, ST1-11LW, ST1-9ES. 

Topic: Energy

Year levels: 1 and 2

Indoor or outdoor activity: Indoor

Time required: 20 mins

Learning areas addressed: Science, Sustainability.

Level of teacher scaffolding: Lead a class discussion and in an activity around ways of saving energy.

Resources required: Student worksheet cut into pieces.

Homework and extension opportunities: None.

Keywords: energy, game, flashcards, electricity. 

Cool Australia’s curriculum team continually reviews and refines our resources to be in line with changes to the Australian Curriculum.

Worksheets

Teacher Worksheet

Teacher preparation

Step 1: Engage your students in a discussion around the following questions:

• What do we need energy for?
• Where do we use energy?
• What would we do without energy?
• How is energy bad for our environment? (The main types of energy cause pollution that hurts our environment.)
• Why should we try to use less energy?
• In what ways can we use less energy? (See following activity.)

Learning about using less energy

Step 2: Print out one copy of the student worksheet and cut up the worksheet so that you have 10 flashcards and the list showing the action each flashcard represents.

Showing the class the flashcards and using the list of actions, talk about the action that they represent (i.e. the picture of the jumper means that instead of turning on the heater we could put on a jumper).

Once you have worked through each image, begin holding up each image and ask students if they remember what action the image represented. Assist students where necessary. Repe

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Student Worksheet

Using Less Energy at Home

1. Tap - use cold water instead of hot when you can. Warm water needs to be heated and heating the water uses energy. So next time you wash your hands or wash some clothes, use cold water!

2. TV - turn off the TV, computer or any other electrical appliance when you’re not using them. Turning off your TV or computer when you’re not using them will save heaps of energy!

3. Window - use the light from the sun to light up your room instead of turning on the light. Also use the sunlight to warm up your room in winter instead of turning on the heater.

4. Standby - that little light that stays on after you’ve turned off your TV or computer is called standby. It means that your TV or computer can be switched on again very quickly. But it also uses lots of energy.

So get mum or dad to help you turn things off at the power point. But make sure you don’t turn off the things that need to stay on all the time, like the fridge!

5. Energy efficient light bulb - next ti

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