World Wildlife Day | 2Simple

On March 3rd, it is World Wildlife Day, a time to celebrate and raise awareness of the world’s wild animals and plants. The theme for World Wildlife Day 2026 is ‘Medicinal and Aromatic Plants: Conserving Health, Heritage and Livelihoods’. There’s a wide range of educational resources available within Purple Mash that support the theme that you can use to celebrate World Wildlife Day.

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Activity Ideas for 'Medicinal and Aromatic Plants' for Primary Schools

Wanting some ideas on how you can bring this year's World Wildlife Day's theme into your classroom? Look no further!

Plant a Sensory Garden

This is the perfect opportunity to get children involved in restoring an area of your school grounds. If you're short on time (and budget!), then get children to design a sensory garden, which can be built later on in the year. Talk about which plants are 'aromatic' - you may want to include:

Lavender
Mint
Rosemary
Chamomile
Thyme

Children could also create a plant factfile explaining where the plant grows naturally, its medicinal uses, and why pollinators need it.

You can obviously turn this into a full-scale project and build the garden if you have time - it could also make a fantastic post-SATs Year 6 project as a legacy.

Plants and Animals Uses

Blank Leaflet Template

If you don't have space in your school grounds, you could create a class window box 'apothecary'!

Explore Medicine Through Time

A great research project or link to your history topic is to bring in a lesson or two on 'Medicine through Time', where pupils can explore what people in the past used as medicine.

This could be a whole-school project with each year group or class studying a different period in time, and then coming together with a whole-school assembly sharing the findings.

Map Medicinal Plants around the World

Split your class into groups and give each group an area of the world to research and write about.

Potential areas could be:

Rainforest plants
Mediterranean herbs
Asian traditional medicine plants
African indigenous plants

They could research how the communities use them, what happens if natural areas in those places are destroyed, and how conservation protects livelihoods.

The Medicines of the Rainforest resource on Purple Mash is a great starting point for this activity.