In my graduate thesis "Ecological education in the first educational cycle" I wanted to find out what the students' attitude to nature is. Environmental education should teach students about ecology, nature pollution, how polluted the environment affects human life, and what are the protection and improvement measures. In order to be as conscientious about planet Earth, we, as students, must be encouraged by the thought and examples that planet Earth should be guarded. The protection and preservation of nature is of great importance for the quality of life, and it is also a legacy to our successors. We need to ask ourselves what we can do to make nature cleaner, healthier and more beautiful in the coming years. The theoretical part deals with the history of ecological education, education for sustainable development, which factors influence ecological education, and then the development of awareness among ecological students. Ecological activities in the teaching of Nature and Society are described and the tasks of environmental education in the Curriculum of the elementary school in the Republic of Croatia are analyzed. The thesis determines the representation of ecological topics in the current textbooks of Nature and Society from 1st to 4th grade of primary school, publishing houses: Alfa and Školska knjiga, in relation to the total number of teaching topics. The results showed that these topics were underrepresented in textbooks in grades 1-4. The goals of the research were to find out if the students understand the concepts: waste, recycling, pollution, environment, water, whether students are aware of human dependence on nature and the environment, whether students can sort waste independently and whether they understand the importance of sorting and utilizing waste. Through various tasks in the workshops. I have tried to encourage responsible behavior among students and to introduce students to the possibilities of waste utilization. I sought to achieve this through environmental workshops in which all students participated, regardless of ability. 17 students of the and grade of elementary school "Ivan Goran Kovačić" in Slavonski Brod participated in the work.