Sustainable life practice for preschool pupils: Sustainable environmental education program (SEEP) model

Abstract

Global pollution can only handle with education in early childhood. Especially, the pre-school period is an important time for environmental education. It is seen that current pre-school education programs generally include environmental education but it has missing parts. The aim of the study is to add the built environment elements to the environmental education programs that include only natural elements such as trees, animals, etc. The environment is basically divided into two parts as natural and built (man-made structures). There is no environmental education program in the literature that includes these two basic subjects. The built environment includes architectural elements such as buildings, bridges, and infrastructure systems. All people use these systems and should have knowledge about them. The complete Sustainable Environmental Education Model has been created which is including both natural and built environmental elements for preschool pupils in the study. The LEED criteria were taken as a reference while planning the model. The model was applied to 134 (5 years old) pupils who studying pre-school education for eight months. As a result of the model application, the level of awareness of pupils who have never study any environmental education before, according to the beginning of the program, is from 23.37% to 79.81% in sustainable areas, from 23.87% to 85.32% in "efficient water use", from 13.80% to 91.79% in efficient energy use and from 13.78% to 82.98% in the usage of waste materials It was determined that it increased. The designed model can be the solution for global pollution.