Educational Resources for the
International Year of Older Persons
Australian Coalition '99

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IDEAS FOR PRIMARY SCHOOLS


  • Invite older people to work on a volunteer basis in the school. Some ways they could do this are as helping in the class room, hearing children read, preparing worksheets on the computer, helping in the office, working with a group of children in the garden and so on.

  • Visit older people in nursing homes. These visits could be held on a regular basis with each child being 'paired' with an older person. Activities from all curriculum areas could be based on these visits.

  • Hold a Grandparents Day when the children invite their Grandparents to come to school.

  • Get all members of the school community - children, staff, parents to bring photos of themselves with their Grandparent. Make a display of the photographs.

  • Review how older people could be more involved in the life of the school on a permanent basis. (for example, grandparents on school council/committees, as volunteers in the library, canteen or classroom).

  • Ask parents, grandparents and carers for their ideas about how your school community could best celebrate and acknowledge older people. This could be done with a brief questionaire in your school newsletter.

  • An exercise undertaken by one group of primary school students involved them asking a grandparent or older person in the family to complete the sentece "The best thing about growing old is...." The completed sentences were displayed in the school foyer for all school community members to read.

  • THANKS TO COTA SA FOR THESE LAST THREE SUGGESTIONS

    IDEAS FOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES
  • Conduct a series of surveys and youth assemblies on ageing;

  • Write and perform an oral history play where, first, a group of students make tape-recordings of seniors talking about their lies and then write a play on the basis of the recordings, in which seniors would play themselves as they are today and youth would play the seniors as they were during the events recorded.

  • Launch a poster and/or essay competition offering prizes for the poster or essay that best depicts a theme related to inter-generational cooperation. Prizes could be donated by local business or shops; winning posters could be exhibited, and the best essays published or broadcast by the local media.

    IDEAS FOR TERTIARY INSTITUTIONS

  • Arrange lectures and workshops for journalists, advertisers, architects, employers, social and health care caregivers, family caregivers, volunteers, and members of local government on the implications of an ageing population and options in responding to it.

  • Expand education for seniors by
    1. making available a number of places in regular courses, at reduced rates or free of charge, specifically for older people and
    2. organising special courses for seniors on themes directly relating to ageing, such as health maintenance, income security and changing images of older people.

  • Establish gerontology as a core subject for students of social sciences, journalism and education, as well as nursing and medicine, where geriatrics may also be made a core subject.

  • Conduct surveys, in cooperation with seniors, for use in developing local plans and programs on ageing, including, for example, a survey of training needs of the aging, their families and soci-economic and political institutions. A parallel survey could be of the training needs of the ageing, their families and soci-economic and political institutions. Yet another survey could be conducted on the preparedness of adult and other educational institutions to provide the required training.

    IDEAS FOR THE ADMINISTRATORS OF EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

  • Organise exchanges between retired teachers in developed and developing countries to support literacy as well as cultural understanding and enrichment.

  • Introduce flexible retirement ages and practices and organise pre-retirement consultations.

  • Organise staff inservices on ageing issues, e.g. language, attitudes, needs.

    RESOURCES

    USEFUL LINKS