How to be an Energy Champion!
If there’s one thing that we have learnt through the Cosy Home Club, it is just how important the work we are all doing together is (despite it being warm and sunny now!). Sharing knowledge and learning about home energy efficiency and retrofit with as many people as possible is a key objective for the Club. We want everyone in our community to benefit from the opportunity to live in a warm, affordable, healthy and secure home, and sharing knowledge is one way that we can start to change things for the better!
Emily, Rachael and Tom from the Cosy Homes Club teamed up with 62 year 4 students in All Saints Primary school as part of their ‘Learning to Serve’ programme, teaching them about retrofit, energy efficiency, and how they can become an energy champion!
In our first session, we talked about some of the basics of energy use at home and played a game of ‘Higher or Lower!’ to discover which parts of a building lost the most heat (spoiler: 35% of heat is lost through the external walls, followed by 25% through the roof!).
After learning that an energy efficient home can help us to stay healthy, to save money AND be good for the planet, we discussed some of the ways in which a home can be retrofitted to achieve this and then gave the pupils a chance to put some of this knowledge into practice by retrofitting their own miniature homes.
In our second session, the focus was on the importance of considering home energy efficiency in the wider context, again playing ‘Higher or Lower!’ but this time learning about which sectors in the UK produce the most greenhouse gases.
Tom introduced the pupils to the idea of climate justice and everyone was shocked to learn that over the past 200 years, the UK alone has produced the same amount of greenhouse gases as the entire continent of Africa!
We used the slide above to illustrate how greenhouse gas emissions (over the past 200 years) from the UK are equal to EVERY country in Africa.
As this was part of year 4’s ‘Learning to Serve’ programme, we tasked the pupils with creating a poster to share an aspect of all their new knowledge. As well as each creating brilliantly creative and unique posters, the pupils also wrote and performed an assembly for an audience of parents and carers to share their learning and really help to get the message about energy efficiency and retrofit out into the community. And of course, everyone received a certificate to show that they are now a Cosy Homes Club Energy Champion!