EMEB Profª Maria Aparecida De Souza Almeida Ramos

EMEB Profª Maria Aparecida De Souza Almeida Ramos, a government Kindergarten school in Jundiaí, São Paulo, Brazil, is a model for how early childhood education can promote health, environmental stewardship, and community engagement. Affectionately nicknamed ‘Little Fish’, the early childhood education school has established a Pedagogical Political Project that focuses on raising awareness and engaging parents, communities, and children for a more just, sustainable, and healthy life.

The school’s demographic is 3- to 5-year-olds from a small, economically-disadvantaged community. As such, the school’s healthy eating initiative forms the baseline of its Pedagogical Political Project. To that end, the school manages its own vegetable garden at and has developed several teaching strategies to incorporate the project. This has led to children becoming more interested in planting, harvesting, and preparing food, and families have also created organic gardens in their homes based on the school’s guidance.

To offset the number of hours children have reported being in front of screens and the limited amount of free play they have access to in natural spaces, the school also conducts regular outdoor activities, collecting elements from nature for artistic productions, building mandalas (geometric configurations of symbols) from leaves and seeds, and encouraging the children to do the same at home.

The outdoor activities in a naturalised space also teach the children to respect the various forms of life that they discover around their school, such as small animals, plants, and insects. This creates a connection with nature, where some school projects involve taking care of chickens and building an insect hotel.

The school is also focused on environmental care and sustainability, teaching children about composting, how to use water without wasting it, taking part in street cleanups to collect and properly dispose of recyclable materials, as well as the proper disposal of cooking oil, to teach them how they can minimise their impact on the environment.

If EMEB Profª Maria Aparecida De Souza Almeida Ramos wins the World's Best School Prize for Supporting Healthy Lives, it intends to expand its initiatives and inspire other schools to follow its example.