Spring Clean Week 2025
Spring Clean Week 2025
Timed with the start of our Spring Clean Campaign, these lessons look into more unusual types of waste, and focus on how Reduce, Reuse, Recycle can help us tackle litter and waste at its origin.
This year's lessons cover all areas of the curriculum through the lens of Learning for Sustainability with follow up resources for each lesson to take learning further.
These lessons and activities are open to all ages, but are most appropriate for upper primary and lower secondary pupils, inspiring you and your pupils to take part in our annual Spring Clean Scotland Campaign and join the fight against litter!
We are grateful to our friends from the Scottish Friendly Children's Book Tour and Scottish Book Trust, for support with this year's lessons.
Activities for the week:
As part of Scottish Spring Clean 2025, we would like to invite participating classes to join us in making Scotland cleaner:
- Adopt a place near you that you want to keep beautiful, either in your school or in your community. Look after this place for the week by carrying out litter picks and taking part in the follow up activities from the week's lessons.
- Take a photo of your place and send it to us for our Young Reporters for the Environment 30th birthday competition. Tell us why it is important to keep this place beautiful and your photo could feature in our 30th Anniversary calendar and you could win a cash prize.
- Record your litter pick in our Litter League schools competition and help your Local Authority area claim the trophy! Please remember to register your pick (you can do it before or after the event). This lets us know how much litter is getting cleaned up, and how many people are joining in the effort.
Full details of these activities can be found in our Adopt a Place resource below.
Lessons for all ages
Lesson 1: Creating Poetry to Tackle Waste
Join multi-award-winning children’s author, poet and playwright Joseph Coelho for a highly interactive lesson in poetry. Joseph takes suggestions from the audience to create poems around the topics of reusing and recycling, covering Languages and Expressive Arts. You can view a screenshot of the poem created in the lesson.
Spring Clean Week 2025 Live Lesson 1
Use our follow up resource to create your own poem with one of Joseph's poetry prompt videos.
Lesson 2: Tidying up our digital environment
Yvonne Skipper from the University of Glasgow discusses how our online space has become littered and how we can start to clean it up. Yvonne guides us through what personal information we might be sharing online, how we can keep our information private and how to report online issues, covering Technologies and Health and Wellbeing. You can have a look at the example social media profile Yvonne shared during the lesson and try to guess the password for the account.
Spring Clean Week 2025 Live Lesson 2
Following the lesson, have a go at our digital spring clean activity to help clean up our online environment.
Lesson 3: The story of a crisp packet
Most of us have heard of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, but what does this really look like for items we use every day? Join us to go on an interactive journey with a crisp packet to see what it's fate could be and how we can help to tell a story that is kinder to our environment, covering Science and Maths.
Spring Clean Week 2025 Live Lesson 3
Following the lesson, investigate a piece of litter in your local area using our resource.
Lesson 4: Working with your community to tackle litter and waste
Tackling litter and waste is a big task, but it can be made much easier if we find people to help us. In this lesson we look at how schools have worked with their local community, and how historically communities have pulled together to take on big problems. This lesson covers Social Studies and Religious & Moral Education. Find out more about the Love Darg mentioned in the lesson and other cultural traditions in the Dandelion Dig Where you Stand resource. You can view the Waulking song video on YouTube.
Spring Clean Week 2025 Live Lesson 4
Following the lesson, we invite you to use our resource to start some new community connections with your school.
Assembly
Assembly revisiting all concepts learned throughout the week, answering questions sent to our guests, and displaying all the work shared with us throughout the week.
Spring Clean Week 2025 Assembly
Did you enjoy these lessons?
Then visit our homepage to see what's coming next and register to join in.
You might also be interested in...
This week of Live Lessons accompanies our annual Spring Clean Campaign. Find out how you can help us keep Scotland looking beautiful by organising a Clean Up in your school or community.
Related Lessons
Celebrations are fun! We want you to be able to celebrate in a way that is good for the planet. This lesson is part of our Eco-Schools 30th birthday celebrations, but is relevant to any celebration you are having in school.
Leasan Gàidhlig air sgudal a tha aig an aon àm ris an Iomairt Glanadh an Earraich.
Gaelic lesson on litter and waste timed with our Spring Clean campaign.
A series of lessons including a story from author Tracey Corderoy, a discussion of school canteen waste, suggestions on how can we reduce waste with Ostrero and a demonstration of a binbag autopsy!
Learn how spring cleaning is a centuries old tradition linked to cultures and religions around the world.
