Turning It Around in the classroom

It’s a Tuesday morning in a bright, slightly noisy classroom in Almaty region.

The rain from last night has left the playground shining, and 20 eight-year-olds are already buzzing with energy.

Their teacher, Ms Aidarova, writes two words on the board: климаттың өзгеруі.

That is the Kazakh for climate change. 

A few students nod, they’ve heard the phrase before. Perhaps on TV or from older siblings. But their faces tighten a little. It sounds like something adults talk about. A little remote. Something big, maybe frightening.

This is exactly the barrier the Turn It Around! project was designed to break. Developed by UNESCO Almaty, CAPS Unlock, and the Central Asian Alliance for Climate Education (TsAKO), with support from Arizona State University, the project transforms abstract anxiety into curiosity.

The tool is disarmingly simple: a deck of illustrated cards, created by young people across Central Asia in six languages: Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Uzbek, Russian, and English. Each card shows a scene, a question, or a challenge drawn from real life: a dried riverbed, a crowded city street, a family saving water, a child planting a tree.

Ms Aidarova divides the class into small groups and places a few cards in front of each one. 

“Look carefully,” she says. “What is happening here? What do you think this picture wants to tell us?”

At first there’s chatter and some giggling. The drawings are colorful, expressive, and easy to like. Then the room grows more serious. One group notices a forest on fire. Another sees fish gasping in shallow water.

“That’s the Aral Sea,” says a boy proudly, remembering a documentary he saw. “It used to be huge!”

The teacher gently guides them toward connections. How do these pictures relate to their own city, town or village? What changes have they or their older relatives noticed? Hotter summers, less snow, new buildings where fields used to be?

Suddenly, climate change is not a distant headline but something that touches the edges of their own experience.

The training manual that accompanies the deck encourages teachers to build lessons around such moments. The cards are not there to lecture, but to prompt discovery.

In science classes, they can lead to experiments about temperature or water cycles. In language lessons, they become stories and poems. In art, they inspire posters and small campaigns. The goal is always the same: to help children think critically and work collaboratively, using what they already know to imagine solutions.

In Ms Aidarova’s class, one group decides to design a poster showing how to save water at home. Another writes a short letter to the mayor suggesting that every school should plant trees each spring. The act of creation turns concern into agency. By the end of the hour, the phrase climate change has lost some of its weight.

Of course, in classes in other countries in the region, the words will sound different. In Kyrgyzstan, it will be something slightly similar: климаттын өзгөрүшү. And then Iqlim o’zgarishi in Uzbekistan. Next door, in Tajkistan, it will be тағйирёбии иқлим. 

But the philosophy behind Turn It Around! will remain the same. Learning about the planet should be hopeful, tactile, and shared.

The cards grew out of a global initiative launched by Arizona State University in 2021, and they have now been localized for Central Asia by CAPS Unlock and its partners. A regional committee selected 68 illustrations from hundreds of submissions by students, many of whom had never before seen their artwork printed.

One of them, Aiym Mynbai, a member of the student club SDG Legion AlmaU at Almaty Management University, described it best at the project’s launch.

“Our nature is not just a background. It is our culture, our values, it is who we are,” she said.

Now these decks, born from that conviction, are on their way to classrooms from Tashkent to Dushanbe, from Bishkek to Shymkent. They invite children to see themselves not as passive observers of a crisis, but as its youngest problem-solvers.

When the lesson ends, Ms Aidarova gathers the cards back into their box.

“Next time,” she tells her students, “we’ll make our own.” 

The children nod eagerly. The climate is changing, yes, but so, perhaps, is the way we learn to face it.

Check out our YouTube channel to watch a step-by-step video on how to put the Turn It Around! Flashcards to work in your classroom.

You can also access lesson plans for elementary, middle, and secondary programs in the documents below in Kazakh and Russian. You can download and use them in the classroom. Please, do not hesitate to share your feedback. Contact us via info@capsunlock.org.