Year 3 and 4 (Age 8 – 10)

9 weeks

Using dramatic conventions, students explore the lived experiences and sustainability values of First Nations peoples, fostering empathy and deeper understanding. By stepping into roles as “Earth Guardians,” they embark on a creative quest to gather wisdom, stories, and collective insights that give voice to the last tree on Earth. This imaginative journey encourages personal agency and inspires action, cultivating hope and a sense of responsibility in relation to sustainability.

These experiences support students in developing aesthetic knowledge across cognitive, sensory, emotive, and physical domains, and in valuing artworks and practices from diverse times, places, and other cultural contexts.

• Use stimulus materials, such as images, events, texts, questions, and observations, as inspiration for their own making and responding to drama.
• Describe and use selected elements of drama they experience, create and/or perform.
• Describe where, why and/or how drama is created and/or performed across cultures, times, places and/or other contexts.
• Use selected elements of drama.
• Collaborate to improvise and/or devise drama that communicates ideas, perspectives and/or meaning.

Literacy; Personal and social capability; Intercultural understanding; Numeracy; ICT capability; Critical and creative thinking.

As a summative task, students craft a performance poetry piece using individual reflections written in the form of “Earth Guardians”. These lines, shaped by dramatic experiences and research in class, convey personal messages about sustainability.

Students collaboratively sequence and refine their lines into an original poem, which is then transformed into a dynamic performance using the elements of drama.

This unit of work can be delivered as an integrated unit, combining English, Science and Visual Arts. Students can engage with sustainability concepts across disciplines, developing literacy and communication skills in English, exploring environmental and ecological knowledge in Science, and expressing ideas creatively through the Visual Arts.

This unit was created by:

• Natasha Bryant – Drama teacher
• Marthy Watson – Lecturer

• Earth Guardians – Drama Unit for Year 3 and 4

• Poem – Earth Guardians
• The Pledge
• Poem template

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