Section 4: What does your home need?

Overview

Continuing on from thinking about materials and energy, this section will get pupils thinking about what happens inside the house.

Time Needed

45 minutes – 1 hour

Activity 1: What rooms are in the house?

Pupils will develop their design ideas through bubble diagrams. They will consider the different spaces and rooms they need, and how they connect to one another. They will also consider what the attributes of each key space will be; warm and cosy, light and welcoming etc. 

Points to consider

• Is it a big house or a small house? Big houses take up much more energy than smaller ones, so what steps can they take to combat this?

• How many bathrooms will we need? We will need to significantly reduce water usage in the future, so how do we work towards lesser consumption?

• How much space does each room need?

• How could you provide natural heat, light, water and power to the rooms?

Pupils should be given a piece of paper. In groups, they should start to consider what rooms need to go inside the house. For each key space, they should aim to identify a minimum of one way that this house is different to the ones they live in today. e.g. a composting toilet, a roof garden to grow food, an electric point for their electric car…

 Activity 2: What is around your house?

Print the ‘What is around the house’ resource sheet. If you have an A3 printer, we recommended printing on A3.

Pupils will now think about the house’s outside space and what kinds of things are there. There are 4 questions for them to think about which covers:

• Where is the house?
• How do they get to and from the house?
• What is in the house’s outside space?
• What are the challenges about where they live?

Encourage them to think about what would suit the needs of their household. For example:

• Are there accessibility issues with the household?
• Do they need to be near a high street?
• Do they need a space to make things for their business?
• How can they encourage people living in the house to use their car less and use other modes of transport?

Also get pupils to think how they could utilise the aspects of their house location. For example:

• Will they have a garden? If so, what will be in it?
• Is the house surrounded by water? How would they use it?
• Will they grow some of their own food?
• How could they encourage wildlife?

Distribute the ‘What is around the house’ resource sheet. They should draw and/or write the types of things that they would like to include and why they have chosen them underneath the headings.

Download resources

External resources

Pinterest Board – Accessibility Ideas

Pinterest Board – DIY garden spaces

Go to Section 5.