Online Workshop: Beyond Recycling: Child-led Design & Sustainability

Recycling is now embedded in many early learning settings — but what if sustainability began long before the bin and children were leading the change?

In this interactive Online Workshop, held in the lead up to National Recycling Week, we explore how educators can move beyond sorting waste and support children to design solutions to everyday sustainability challenges using STEM-informed inquiry.

Over 2 hours, educators will use the waste hierarchy — avoid, reduce, reuse, repair, recycle, dispose — to examine proactive sustainability in early learning settings from infancy through to early primary. This will include how sustainability can be woven into daily routines, environments, and learning experiences, rather than as a one-off event, in line with the EYLF V2.0 Sustainability Principle.

A key focus of the workshop is exploring the relationship between sustainability and design thinking — which in the context of ECEC, is a way of positioning children as capable problem-solvers and change-makers who can identify real issues in their environment, consider the impact of their choices, and collaboratively design, test and refine solutions through play-based inquiry. For example, children observing pooling rainwater in the outdoor space and designing and testing a system using buckets, gutters, and funnels, to redirect rain to the garden.

By the end of the workshop, educators will have developed a four-week implementation plan for their setting that meaningfully engages families, the community, and puts children in the driving seat in the lead up to National Recycling Week.

During this Online Workshop, educators will:

• Explore the difference between reactive recycling routines & proactive sustainability practices.
• Apply the waste hierarchy in practical, age-appropriate ways.
• Support children to identify everyday problems & design solutions.
• Facilitate child-led design challenges inspired by children’s questions or book-based prompts.
• Use re-used & open-ended materials to strengthen STEM investigations.
• Develop a purposeful “Material Buffet” of re-used resources.
• Examine real examples of child-led responses to environmental challenges.
• Plan and implement a four-week sustainability focus in their service.

This Online Workshop will be held on: 

Date: Thursday 29 October 2026

Time zones: 3-5pm AEDT, 2-4pm AEST, 12-2pm AWST, 2:30-4:30pm ACDT, 1:30-3:30pm ACST.

Purchasing a ticket allows you to tune in live or via a recording. While we strongly encourage attending live, a recording will be shared via email following the event and can be viewed for 3 days. 

This interactive session may include Zoom whiteboards, breakout rooms, and collaborative chat activities.

Curriculum links:  

EYLF & MTOP:  

Principles:

• Sustainability

Practices:

• Holistic, integrated and interconnected approaches 
• Responsiveness to children/Collaboration with children and young people 
• Play-based learning/leisure and intentionality 
• Learning environments 

Outcomes: 2.1, 2.3, 2.4, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 5.1, 5.3 

Australian Curriculum: AC9TDEFP01, AC9TDE2P02, AC9TDE2P03, AC9TDE2P04