One of our biggest achievements this year was the release of the Zero Waste Malaysia Lesson Plan, which was an extension of our mission to educate & raise awareness on waste management here in Malaysia. To compliment the launch of the ZWM Lesson Plan, we also launched Wira Zero Waste, a series of virtual classes guided by facilitators utilising the ZWM Lesson Plan to educate students aged 11-17 to kickstart their zero waste journey.
While crafting the ZWM Lesson Plans and hosting the Wira Zero Waste lessons, the team had the following aims and objectives in mind:
- Provide a free educational lesson plan specifically related to waste, for teachers or parents to use at home or in class to educate children aged 11 to 17 years.
- Provide content based on familiar local setting in local languages
- Engage around 300 students in Malaysia for free virtual lessons.
- Accelerate the awareness in waste-related environmental problems and open discussions for ways to solve the problems.
- Kickstart the adoption of zero waste and circular economy modules in the curriculum of public primary and secondary schools nationwide.
The lesson plan is created in accordance with the Malaysian Secondary School Curriculum Standard (KSSM) and comes in 5 separate modules. Each of the modules includes all the necessary materials for teachers, parents & educators of all kinds. This even included audio & visual aid in the form of videos and presentation slides, as well as activity sheets that can be printed out. Most importantly, the lesson plan contains localised and contextualised resources in English, BM, Chinese and Tamil.
To guide students on their zero waste journey, the modules started with explaining basic concepts of waste and ended with calls to action on what the students can do on a daily basis to reduce waste. The topics discussed in the modules are as follows:
Module 1: What is waste?
Module 2: Where does waste go?
Module 3: Types of waste
Module 4: How much waste do we produce?
Module 5: What can we do?