Cedric Ryckaert, Teacher, Sint-Paulusschool: Sint-Paulusschool is a kindergarten, nursery and primary school. We have 485 children here at school, and in 2016 we started to think about our school garden and our school grounds to change them into a climate adaptive school ground. For us it’s a school ground that provides lots of answers to climate change. We have worked on topics like heat stress, air quality, the infiltration of water, and we work together with the kids on these topics, so we use our school ground now as an outdoor classroom to look for answers to investigate climate change together with our children.

We have been involved in many partnerships like with the University of Antwerp and a Catholic education umbrella in Flanders on the Vallis project, and they have helped us out with looking at projects in a holistic way to create action competence. So, education for sustainable development for us is linked to all of these things, so we are trying to teach our children to look at challenges in a holistic way.

We know that is the future. We try to have a whole-school approach, have lots of links with the community, and bring in that community, bring in experts that teach our children about all these challenges they are facing. But we also try to bring in lots of technology, so at school we have beehives, parents taking care of the bees, so we sell our own honey. We have chickens here at the school and we use all of those things in our lessons. As a teacher that’s great, because it makes learning real. But you also have a weather station, wildlife cameras and birdboxes, because we know that kind of technology inspires the kids to be really active on learning outdoors.

We have labelled all of our trees with QR tags, so every tree here on the school ground has its own online passport, we have a dashboard… and we can teach the kids about what is growing here.

Lukas Vanhuysse, Student: I learn about new animals, insects, new trees and so on. And in the class we talk about these a lot, so I find that very nice. And I also find it interesting and want to know a lot more about it.

Cedric: I try to give impulses through STEAM activities, through mathematics, through language and I say okay, when you work on garbage in the streets, know that you are working on these goals. I will provide you with the lesson, I will provide you with the goals, and just go out, do it, talk with your kids. When you work in the school garden, you work on mathematics, you work on language. These are the goals that you can reach just by stepping out of the door. And we don’t have to travel really far, we use this place. And for the kids we know this is really inspiring, and we notice that it creates something special.