Global Citizenship in the Early Years: Sustainable Fashion
Learning about sustainability is a key component of our Early Years programme at Dulwich College Shanghai Puxi. All children get to experience a range of activities and complete service projects or inquiries as part of our global citizenship curriculum. Our children have important thoughts about how to protect our planet, are active in the Mustangs Challenge and loved our recent World Earth Day. Following on from this we enjoyed a special ‘sustainable fashion’ themed week.
Toddler classes enjoyed learning English names for different items of clothing and focused on hats. They were so creative when designing their own sustainable outfit for their online fashion show. Matthew used papier mache to create a large textured sun hat. William made a wonderful vest out of a plastic bag and accompanied it with a paper lantern. Eden created a beautiful vest out of a fabric bag and showed good fine motor strength when cutting the holes for his arms. They really enjoyed moving in different ways on the catwalk and pretending to be models.
Nursery explored the concept of change, particularly how animals change through their life cycle. They started the week reading ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ and spoke about how the caterpillar changed while it was inside its chrysalis. This led to them exploring what other animals changed such as tadpoles changing into frogs and chicks into hens. In story times they read about a colourful patchwork elephant called Elmer who changed his appearance to try to fit in with the other elephants. They also noticed how Cinderella changed her appearance and how this affected her feelings. For their eco-fashion challenge, nursery children decided to focus on reusing materials to change into something else, such as animals, plants and even objects!
Reception have had a strong interest in the concepts of materiality and sustainability this year. They have explored bags and dresses and even got to meet Cecilia from Year 2’s mother, who is a real-life designer. Cecilia's mother kindly showed the children her collections and the children also got to speak to her designers. Throughout this inquiry the children learnt how important material selection was in designs and techniques for joining materials together. They loved learning how to sew using the sewing machine.
Reception also loved learning about shoes. They compared the materials of different shoes and learnt the names for the different parts of shoes such as soles, heels and toes. After this they looked at famous shoe designers and their logos. They were excited to go on a shoe hunt and find all the logos on their shoes at home. Watching videos showed the children the process of shoe making and how it takes teamwork. They were excellent at talking about how they showed teamwork at home this week such as listening to instructions when cooking pancakes and dumplings or sharing toys with their siblings.
After all of this inquiry the children were inspired to draw their own shoes designs. In order to be sustainable Reception decided to upcycle an old pair of shoes rather than create new shoes. They enjoyed creating different movements to showcase their updated shoes and walking like models on their catwalks. It was lovely to see how their thinking had moved on from their sustainable fashion show in Nursery.
During our Thursday morning community time all the Early Years children came together wearing either their favourite outfit or the one they had created themselves. There are definitely some future fashion designers in the making at Dulwich College Shanghai Puxi.
