Activity: Our precious home

You’ve probably heard about the climate crisis already. It’s a big issue and all around the country and the world more and more young people are demanding urgent climate action. We have to transform our ways of living to reduce emissions and have a liveable planet.

• The effects of the climate crisis are very real already. In the Pacific, the impact is being felt every day and here in Aotearoa we are feeling the impacts more and more. Watch the video below from the Pacific Climate Warriors. What are the key messages that you hear from the speech?

• Imagine you were one of the protestors on the street that day, listening to this speech and looking around at all the young Pacific people. Write or record a voice message to a friend about what it feels like to be a part of this huge march.

• At the end of the video is a quote from Koreti Mavaega Tiumalu: “This fight needs everyone. It needs everyone doing something, and everyone can do something.” What are the actions you can take in your world, at your school, in your home and with your community?

We’ve seen some huge protest actions already. The School Strike for Climate Change was one of the very biggest crowds Aotearoa had ever seen. Te Papa collected some items from this protest march as a way of recording our history. The placard below was just one of the protest signs collected from the School Strike for Climate.

School Strike for Climate Action placard, March 2019, New Zealand, by Hazel Cubis. Gift of Hazel Cubis, 2019. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Te Papa (GH025416)

• Design your own placard that you would carry in a climate march. Start off by brainstorming the ideas that you have about what needs to change. You might need to do some research about the climate crisis to learn more about it as an issue.

• Look at your brainstormed ideas, and see if there are any symbols, colours or images that you can use to help communicate your message.

• Protest signs often incorporate text – maybe as a slogan or rhyme. The person who made this sign used a lyric from a well-known song, Uptown Funk by Bruno Mars. How can you turn your message into a catchy phrase?

• Display your placards somewhere where they can be seen by the largest amount of people as possible. You may want to:create a placard display outside your schoolorganise a march to the local council with specific demandsexhibit them in a local library or community space.