The handbook

HOB’s teams have finished (the English version) of the Handbook with lesson plans, projects and activities for 5-9 year old children.

Click here to download it.

It’s a large file, so please give it a few minutes to load. There’s also a download button in the top right (down arrow) to save it on your hard drive.

The handbook is a collection of easy to use lesson plans for teaching 5-9-year-old children about biodiversity. The activities incorporate innovative methods such as hands-on learning, digital tools, project-based learning. We also want to increase the physical activeness of children and the time they spend outdoors.

We want teachers to be able to pick and choose activities that are most appropriate for their context and children, so each lesson plan starts with a brief summary and a listing of its topic, objectives and requirements.

The first two sections are intended for kindergarten children age 5-7 and sections 3-4 are for 7-9 year old children. As the lesson plans need to be applicable across different environmental and educational contexts across Europe, we limited local references. To illustrate how to localize a lesson plan to your country and city, we’ve added examples of how they have been adapted to specific locations in the fifth section.

All the lesson plans have been published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA license which means that you can freely use the activities. You can also copy and adapt the materials as long as you mention HOB;s Adventure and don’t use it for commercial purposes nor try to impose a different license on the materials developed based on these lesson plans. We want this handbook to be a free resource for everyone who’s interested in it.

In the coming months, the handbook will be translated into Estonian, Icelandic, Latvian and Slovenian. Follow this space to be updated when they are ready. We will also organize meetings to introduce the handbook and some of the activities in each country. Feel free to get in touch for more information.

We would like to thank all our contributors from Estonia, Iceland, Latvia and Slovenia. The project (2018-1-EE01-KA201-047083) was co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union, and we greatly appreciate the dedicated support by Archimedes, Estonia. Note that the European Commission's support for the production of this publica- tion does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.