Teaching sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

15 mins

Tune in: How has our school environment changed over time?

30 mins

Find out: The impacts of humans changing environments

10 mins

Take action: So what do we do?

5 mins

Reflection

Tune in: How has our school environment changed over time?

Step 1

Ask your students what has changed in the school environment since they have been here. Were there new buildings? New trees planted? Old trees cut down?

Let’s take a look at some imagery of our schools and see how it has changed over time.

See our Teacher Content page for information on how to access online freely available historical imagery of your school.

Step 2

Start by showing your students the most recent image of the school. Is it different to how the school looks today? What changes can you already notice?

Step back in time and see what differences the students can identify. They might see:

Trees and plants growing
Green areas that have been either cleared or created
Vegetation going from brown to green and back again
Clouds obscuring their view
Buildings, paths and roads being created

To help students understand what they are looking at, it can help to start at the oldest images, and walk through to the newest.

Find out: The impacts of humans changing environments

Step 1

Now that we have seen some visual examples of the changes humans can make over time let’s look at the impacts of human actions on living things in different environments. Human environment changes have seriously impacted each of the living things below.

If you would like to expand this list we recommend looking at the IUCN Red List or the EPCB Act List of Threatened Flora

Step 2

Provide students with a copy of the Student Worksheet, divide them into pairs, and assign them a living thing. Let them know they will be doing some online research to find out about this living thing and how humans have impacted it by changing the environment. As a class, discuss how to frame search engine questions and what we could type into a search engine to get the correct results.

Alternatively, you could use an AI tool such as ChatGPT and discuss how they pose the question to the AI tool and how they can verify the information the tool gives them.

Step 3

Give students time to conduct their research and fill out the table on the Student Works h eet.

For example,

Hooded Plovers (a small southern beach-nesting bird)

Threat	Feral foxes and feral cats
How does this impact the living thing?	They catch and kill vulnerable chicks that can’t fly yet
What is being done about this threat?	Land managers are running programs to control the numbers of foxes and cats.

Step 4

Once students have recorded 5 threats, bring the students back together to share their findings. As they share the different threats, it would be a good idea to record them where the students can see them.

As different pairs share their findings, we will start to see some commonalities of threatening processes brought about by humans in Australia. Let’s group these and create a list. These may include:

habitat loss
introduction of species
climate change
pollution including light and noise pollution,
introduction and/or spread of disease

Take action: So what do we do?

Step 1

Those are some big topics! We have looked at some of the people working to help reduce or remove these threats. Let’s take a look at a success story. Show the students this map. (source: https://www.google.com/maps/@-38.5133812,145.1417446,2999m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu)

Set the scene for your students:

Explain this is the Summerland Penisula on Phillip Island, in Victoria. The Island used to be home to ten colonies of little penguins, but one by one, they were wiped out until there was just one colony left. They were under pressure from foxes, cats, and people accidentally crushing their burrows in the sand dunes on the beach. In 1984, researchers said little penguins would be extinct on the island before the year 2000. The last colony of little penguins was situated in a town of just under 200 houses. The government and the Penguin Reserve Rangers started a buyback scheme to buy all the houses and remove them from the peninsula. Let’s take a look at the impact this scheme had.

Step 2

Change into street view and ‘walk’ along Ventnor Road. In the top right-hand corner, you can click on ‘See more dates’, and it will give you more options for when the street view images were taken. The buyback scheme was completed in 2011, and the earliest streetview photos were taken in 2008. The 2008 images show the remaining houses and some blocks already cleared, and the revegetation process has begun. Start at the eastern end of the peninsula and click through to travel down in the road in 2008. As you go, stop and switch back to the 2023 view. Ask your students what differences they see. They may notice:

Removal of introduced trees and plants
Removal of houses
Much taller grass and ground cover
Removal of overhead power lines
Change in speed limit from 80km/h to 60km/h
More wildlife (swamp wallabies, purple swamp hens, cape barren geese

This little penguin colony is now the largest in the world! It’s home to around 40,000 little penguins. As you get to the western end of the peninsula, can you see any penguin burrows (small holes tucked under the vegetation) or penguin pathways (narrow tracks leading through the vegetation)? Can you see any in the 2008 images? And not just the penguins have benefited, but all the other wildlife has as well. This was a pretty successful project! The researchers, rangers, and politicians who played a role in making this happen should be proud of their handiwork.

Step 3

Let’s go back to our list of ways human changes create threats. Ask students to choose one of these processes and think about the people who could work on those processes to reduce or remove that threat. This will be a long list! After making the list, share with your students that everyone can be involved in making these changes and helping to look after our environment. Because we live here too, after all!

Reflection

Ask students to choose one of the jobs that they listed in Step 3 that they would want to do the most. What would they need to learn about to have that job in the future?

Ecosystem Disruption

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Summary

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