One of the roles of teachers is to develop 21st-century competencies in students, and developing environmental awareness plays a very important role. Namely, we are witnessing increasing climate change caused by human impact on nature. Therefore, it is important to make students aware of the importance of thinking and acting in order to improve living conditions and make students responsible citizens.

Since my students are eight years old, I wanted to show them in a simple and close way how important it is to act immediately and continuously. I decided to show them how important birds are in maintaining the ecosystem, how we can help them in the winter when it is cold and when there is not enough food.

We also got involved in the eTwinning project ‘Plants and Animals of the Homeland’, and started research.

The first task was to explore the school environment, to understand what an ecosystem is and how it works using NBS resources, to study plants characteristic of our homeland. Students researched, drew, photographed, and made a video in the AdobeSpark application.

The second task was to study the birds that live in the school environment and to investigate which are the migrants and which are the tenants by entering them at the table. We used NBS and Oppla portals. After that, they had to describe one bird as desired with a few sentences, and at the and they played games.

The third task was recycling. The students brought plastic bottles to school. They were reminded of what recycling is and why it is important for environmental protection. After watching the tutorials, they received leaflets with instructions on how to make it and went to work. The creative and diligent hands of the students created beautiful houses that lined up one after the other, waiting for the birds to cheer.

We published the results of our work on the eTwinning portal in the group ‘Plants and animals of our homeland’, wanting to encourage project participants to the same activities, and to preserve and sustain the environment.

The last task of our small project about birds was to make various types of bird feeders and place them together with the made houses on the trees in the schoolyard. The students made two types of feeders, one in a net from a potato bag and the other in a pine cone.

Together we took them to the schoolyard, placed them on trees in the hope that indeed our project will help the little birds to survive because in this way we have achieved the goal of our project, which is to preserve the environment in which we live every day.

Returning to school, the students asked me what our next project is because we can certainly do a lot more to make our environment healthier and better to live. The idea was born immediately.

The next project is to make a school hanging garden!