8 Free Digital Lessons for Teaching SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation

Clean water and sanitation are essential for a healthy, sustainable future, and they are the focus of the Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6). This goal aims to ensure access to safe, affordable drinking water and adequate sanitation for all by 2030, addressing critical issues like water scarcity, pollution, and poor hygiene practices. SDG 6 presents a valuable opportunity for educators to help students understand the importance of water conservation, sanitation, and sustainable management of this vital resource.

In this post, you’ll find 8 free and interactive lesson plans designed to teach your students about SDG 6, helping them explore the global challenges related to clean water and sanitation and inspiring them to think critically about sustainable solutions in their own communities.

💡 The digital SDG 6 activities are created with BookWidgets, a content creation and evaluation tool for teachers. You can make a free copy of the lessons below to your BookWidgets account, or you can navigate to this BookWidgets group folder where you can find them all together. This allows you to duplicate the activities, make changes (language, instructions, settings) when needed, and share it with your students. This way, you will also receive the results and be able to provide student feedback.

Make sure to check out more SDG resources below, and stay tuned as we release a new blog post with ready-to-use SDG lessons every month!

Let’s dive in and start bringing SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation into your classroom.

What is SDG 6: Clean Water And Sanitation?

SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation focuses on ensuring the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all by 2030. The goal highlights critical areas such as improving water quality, reducing pollution, increasing water-use efficiency, and ensuring that everyone has access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation. Clean water is essential for survival, and sanitation is crucial for public health, both vital for human dignity and sustainable development. Despite progress, billions of people worldwide still lack access to safe water and proper sanitation, posing serious challenges to health, education, and economic development.

Why should you include SDG 6 in your lessons?

Teaching SDG 6 in the classroom empowers students to understand the critical importance of water as a shared resource and the challenges many communities face in accessing it. Integrating this goal into lessons helps students:

• Raise awareness: By learning about global water issues and the consequences of poor sanitation, students become more aware of real-world challenges and how they affect public health, education, and ecosystems.
• Promote sustainability: Teaching SDG 6 fosters a sense of environmental stewardship, encouraging students to adopt water conservation practices and think about sustainable water management at home and in their communities.
• Develop global citizenship: By connecting local water issues with global challenges, students gain an understanding of the shared responsibility in managing water resources, promoting empathy and a sense of global citizenship.
• Encourage problem-solving: Students are challenged to come up with innovative solutions for water conservation, pollution reduction, and improved sanitation, helping them develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
• Prepare for the Future: As future leaders, innovators, and advocates, students will need to understand the interconnectedness of water and sanitation with other global issues like climate change, health, and economic inequality. Including SDG 6 in their education equips them with the knowledge and motivation to drive positive change.

By teaching SDG 6, you can help students understand that access to clean water is a fundamental human right and that achieving it requires collective action, innovation, and sustainable management.

Check out this checklist with all the themes and goals set for SDG 6.

8 Free and Interactive Lesson Plans to Teach SDG 6 – Clean Water and Sanitation

1. World Toilet Day Reflection Lesson Learning Path

This interactive lesson about World Toilet Day - November 19 - is directly related to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, which focuses on ensuring the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. This lesson can raise awareness about the global sanitation crisis, highlighting the fact that billions of people lack access to safely managed sanitation services. Students navigate through the WebQuest, interacting with the curated resources as a whole class, in groups, or individually. By understanding the importance of toilets in preventing disease and maintaining public health, your students will learn more about issues that exist in other parts of the world and realize that they are in a better situation. Ultimately, educating your students about World Toilet Day promotes actions to achieve universal access to sanitation, aligning with the goals of SDG 6.

2. Clean Water and Sanitation Video Quizz

In this BookWidgets video quiz, elementary students will learn to understand the importance of clean water and sanitation, based on the Clean Water and Sanitation video. It features simple, engaging multiple-choice questions that test key concepts such as why water is essential, how to keep it clean, and how to conserve it.

This quiz is ideal for primary school teachers because it encourages active learning in young children through fun, age-appropriate questions. It can be used to reinforce important environmental lessons, promote class discussions, and help students develop basic critical thinking skills in a playful, interactive way.

3. The Hottest Day in Vivi’s Forest - Split Worksheet

In this story with a moral from naratopia.com, “The Hottest Day in Vivi’s Forest”, a small squirrel Vivi, faces extreme heat in the forest. She searches for her friends who are hiding because of the extreme heat.

This split worksheet exercise connects with the theme of environmental conservation and highlights the importance of natural resources like water and trees. In the story, Vivi and her friends face extreme heat and work together to plant trees, which help retain water in the soil and cool their surroundings. Planting trees also supports ecosystems and improves the availability of water for all living things. Through this activity, students learn how caring for the environment, planting trees, and conserving resources can help improve living conditions, particularly in times of extreme weather.

This exercise is perfect for younger students as the story of Vivi the squirrel captures their imagination. The worksheet encourages environmental responsibility and teamwork through relatable themes like tree planting and caring for nature, which are simple but important concepts for lower primary learners to grasp.

4. Water Cycle - Jigsaw Puzzle

This digital jigsaw puzzle is an engaging way to teach young students about SDG 6. As students complete the puzzle, they visually connect the concepts of clean water access, sustainable water use, and proper sanitation.

The imagery reinforces the importance of water conservation and environmental sustainability and how these impact communities and nature. It’s a hands-on activity that helps young learners grasp the significance of SDG 6 in an interactive and fun way while fostering problem-solving skills and environmental awareness.

5. All About Water - Pair Matching Game

This pair matching exercise focuses on SDG 6, highlighting the importance of water for sustainable development. Your students match key concepts and actions related to water conservation, sanitation, and safe water access with corresponding goals. The exercise encourages awareness of water-related challenges, such as scarcity, pollution, and the need for efficient management. As a teacher, make sure to ask more questions to start the conversation about water with your younger students. This excercise is ideal for primary school students to learn some of the defenitions of SDG 6.

6. SDG 6 - Terminology Flash Cards

This pair matching exercise on SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation is an engaging way for students to learn about the importance of water management and the global challenges related to water accessibility, quality, and conservation.

By matching key terms with their definitions, students deepen their understanding of how water impacts health, the environment, and economic development. This exercise features more complex terminology, making it best suited for high school students.

7. SDG 6 Protecting Our Water Resources - Word Search

This word search activity helps students learn important terms related to SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation. Each word reflects a key concept about how water is managed, conserved, and protected for sustainable use.

By solving the word search, students can better understand the challenges we face regarding water resources and the importance of protecting them for future generations. This activity encourages awareness and learning about water conservation, water quality, and global efforts to achieve access to clean water for all. This activity is ideal for primary and lower secondary (middle school) students because word searches are an effective way to reinforce vocabulary learning through repetition and recognition. It helps younger learners engage with key environmental concepts in a fun, accessible manner while strengthening their understanding of water conservation. This type of exercise supports word recognition skills and encourages curiosity about important global issues, making it suitable for their cognitive development level.

This is a great follow-up exercise to the flash cards the students learned earlier. The flash cards introduced key terms, and this word search will help reinforce those concepts in a fun and engaging way.

8. Water Cycle - Split Whiteboard

Teaching your students about water conservation and SDG 6 can be challenging, but this split whiteboard exercise makes it fun and interactive. This exercise helps students understand the water cycle and its impact on their local environment. After watching the video and reviewing the information, students will use whiteboard tools to create their own water cycle diagram.

The water cycle is more complex than just evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. It plays a crucial role in climate patterns, affecting extreme weather events like droughts and floods. Understanding this helps your students see how changes in the water cycle can impact water resources, agriculture, ecosystems, and society.

By creating a diagram, your students can visualize the water cycle’s influence on their environment and learn the importance of protecting water sources for both human needs and ecosystem health. This activity is ideal for upper primary and middle school as it introduces complex concepts in a hands-on, engaging way. It helps students grasp the water cycle’s role in climate and ecosystems, fostering critical thinking about environmental sustainability.

More ready-to-use SDG lesson plans and resources

Reminder: this is part six of a blog post series about teaching your students about the SDGs. I will post a new blog post about the next SDG every month. Go check out earlier blog posts on the SDGs:

• 8 Engaging Lesson Plans to Teach “SDG 1: No Poverty” to Your Students
• 8 Creative Ways to Teach “SDG 2: Zero Hunger” to Your Students
• 8 Free Lesson Plans to Teach “SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being”
• Bringing SDG 4 into the classroom: 8 lesson ideas for quality education
• 8 free lesson plans on SDG 5 gender equality for all grade level students

And if you can’t wait this long on all the other posts, I already created 1 lesson for each SDG in this digital group work planner activity. Here’s the blog post about teaching the SDGs and you can find all the seperate SDG activities in this BookWidgets group folder in case you want to make some changes.

Wrap up

Teaching SDG 6 in the classroom encourages students to become active participants in solving global water and sanitation challenges. With these interactive, BookWidgets-powered activities, you can engage students while fostering their understanding of sustainable water management.

All the activities are fully customizable with BookWidgets. You can easily duplicate the activities, modify them to fit your student’s needs, and track their progress. Want more lesson ideas and activities? Stay tuned for the next blog post in our series on teaching the SDGs.

Remember, all the featured SDG lesson plans are designed with BookWidgets. You can duplicate the SDG lesson plans from this group, adapt them, and share them with your students. You can also create lessons on this topic or any other topic from scratch. Want to learn more about creating engaging lesson activities with BookWidgets?

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