Sustainability Teaching Resources

Make teaching sustainability easy this school year with printable worksheets, activities for kids, lesson plans and more — all created by teachers for your primary classroom.

This teaching resource collection is aligned with the Australian Curriculum cross-curriculum priority to help your students build a more sustainable future!

Each resource was designed to help your students understand how they can implement sustainable practices in the classroom and at home.

Our teacher team has carefully reviewed and curated each resource to ensure your students will be armed with information on everything from composting to conservation, as well as how to reduce, reuse, recycle, rethink, and repair.

Tackling this topic for the first time in your classroom? Read on for a primer from our teacher team!

What Is Sustainability? A Kid-Friendly Definition

Sustainability is a cross-curriculum priority in the Australian Curriculum and for a good reason. Primary school is an important time to begin talking to students about sustainability as we can instill these practices early and make them into lifelong habits. But explaining this concept to kids can be tricky.

Here's a kid-friendly sustainability definition we like to use to explain its meaning to our students:

Sustainability is the ability to meet someone's current needs without hurting the ability of people in the future to meet their own needs.

On a more technical level, sustainability represents a holistic approach to addressing environmental, social and economic challenges in a way that supports long-term well-being and resilience.

This often includes practices such as reducing carbon emissions, conserving natural resources, and promoting social equity.