Designing a curriculum/ lesson plan for someone who knows nothing about designing a curriculum/ lesson plan

This process was a little daunting for me in the beginning. I don't have much experience in education and absolutely none in designing curriculums. When I got accepted to do the YouCAN Earth Educators Fellowship, and got invited to Tamil Nadu for the initiation workshop, I was certain that I'd be expected to have something of a plan in place. But all I had was a list of activities that I thought would be a fun integration of nature and waste. 

Then we went for the workshop, which was easily one of the best experiences of my life. And for my curriculum, it taught me one thing - structure is important. If anything, it's important to have structure so you know how to break it. 

When I left from the workshop, I had one day in Mysore to myself. And that was the first thing I did. Thought about structure. What does it mean? And also, instead of reinventing the wheel, would it be possible to take inspiration from any other well designed programmes? 

That's when it hit me - use the workshop as your blueprint. While the workshop seemed to flow effortlessly, it was structured very well. Good bones. Then I started to think of what these bones might be - the river of life, value cards, nature trails, world cafe, sessions on art and expression, film screenings about local initiatives to fight climate change. And as I thought, the structure to me, seemed to be - self, surroundings, environment, community. That is what we would start with. 

Then when I got back home and spoke with my boss, we decided on a target audience, which was the next step. We zeroed in on children between the ages of 9-12 from government or government-aided schools. This made sense because having studied in a government-aided school, I knew for a fact that government schools don't do much by way of nature education. So whatever age we started at, it would have to be from scratch, i.e., self; which corroborates the structure from the workshop. 

Next I had to think about how to do a programme on waste. After some thought, I realised it doesn't make sense to do a programme on waste without showing the kids why they should care. So we had to do sessions on nature. In fact for 9 year old kids in school, there would have to be more fun, light hearted sessions on nature than on waste. So I decided on the 3:1 nature:waste ratio. That means, considering 52 weeks, 13 would have to be on waste and 39 on nature. 

The next step was to populate the modules. I already knew a short list of activities that I wanted to conduct - self expression through art and nature, waste walks, farming, etc. I divided these into recurring and non-recurring. Some of them needed progressive sessions over a longer period. So I populated the modules as such. For example, in module 2, we start doing walks where the kids will observe one particular area and paint it. This session is repeated every month so we can see the progress of the area over the year. Ecobricking required 2 sessions - one to learn how to make a single brick, time in between for the kids to make their own, and then a session on how to use them. 

Once this was done, I looked at the YouCAN Self-Review, which is basically a survey in which the questions are various milestones to gauge how your programme is doing. You can set this up yourself by deciding what your end goals are. Work backwards from that to add sessions to your curriculum. 

And finally, I got on a call with one of the facilitators at YouCAN, who guided me to others doing similar courses. I added a few points from these and I was done :)