Population Education, March 2025

Educating the Youngest Global Citizens

Poped Releases New Edition of K-5 Curriculum

The PopEd team recently released a new version of our elementary curriculum, Counting on People: K-5 Activities for Global Citizenship. The 44 teacher-friendly activities include updated favorites, as well as new lessons that focus on real-world topics like climate change and wealth inequality. All are interdisciplinary, incorporating content and skills for science, social studies, mathematics, and language arts. Here’s a sampling of some of the new or newly updated elementary lessons we’re most excited to share with teachers.

Lend a Hand to the Earth

This activity goes beyond individual actions and puts collective action front and center for young learners. Students discover the difference a group can make when everyone works toward the same goal. The lesson builds data literacy skills, like creating simple data representations, and incorporates art to help students tap into both sides of their brains.

Lessons from the Lorax

After reading the classic Dr. Suess book, students play a new board game that picks up where the story ends, once all of the Truffula trees have been cut down. Students aren’t playing against each other. Instead, they must all cooperate and work together in order to “win” by planting trees in the forest while a lumberjack simultaneously tries to cut them down!

Counting Carbon

This new lesson helps upper elementary students model CO₂ production and carbon sinks using biodegradable packing peanuts. In Part 1, they solve word problems to find how much CO₂ is emitted into the atmosphere to get a class of students from home to school. In Part 2, students investigate the four types of natural carbon sinks (oceans, forests, grasslands, and wetlands), and how they store CO₂ (including the emissions from their drive to school in Part 1). Then they strategize ways to limit the “extra” CO₂ that goes into the atmosphere.

More or Less

Our popular cause-and-effect “word web” lesson got an upgrade. In addition to using provided word cards to build a concept map around the central idea of “more people,” images are now included to help build vocabulary and support English Language Learners.

Building Communities

This new lesson introduces students in grades 3–5 to the concept of wealth inequality. They work in small groups to construct 3-D communities with supplies purchased in the “class store,” but they don’t know that each group has a different amount of money to spend. When they examine the completed communities, they’ll see that some groups were able to buy more, and better, materials than other groups. Starting with this local look, students are then challenged to consider wealth inequality at larger scales.

Green Spaces

The urban planning lesson begins with students rating and graphing how they feel before and after spending time outside in nature. They discover some of the unexpected benefits of green spaces — like boosting one’s mood — before they design a city with adequate green space for its population. In addition to the science, social studies, and math content, there is a nice dose of social and emotional learning (SEL), too.

Energy Imagery

In this guided visualization lesson, students portray how energy is used today versus 200 years ago. They pretend to do various tasks, like making breakfast or heating their home, as they would in present day and in the 1820s. Then, it’s time for creative thinking: Students develop an original idea for a renewable energy source that doesn’t yet exist, and create a drawing to share with the class.

In addition to classroom activities, Counting on People also includes age-appropriate readings and annotated lists of recommended children’s books and multimedia links to enhance the PopEd lessons. The full curriculum is provided free (in a digital form) to teachers and future teachers attending our K–5 workshops, and is for sale online. Many of the lessons are also free to download from our program website.

– Carol Bliese, cbliese@populationeducation.org