Resumen en inglés

The environmental situation facing humanity, reflected in a deterioration of the environment, the depletion of natural resources and the lack of environmental awareness of man, leads educational institutions to reorient their training processes, focusing them on environmental social responsibility that children and young people should recognize and assume. This research carries out an analysis on the development of environmental competences based on learning processes by observation from Albert Bandura's social cognitive theory in students of 4th grade of elementary school of the Cristóbal Colón Educational Institution in the city of Montería-Córdoba. A qualitative research approach of hermeneutic type was used, interpreting the realities of the environment that surrounds the students. There were evidences of behaviors that were categorized as activism, valuation, experience, consequences and ignorance, from which four (4) didactic sequences were designed based on the main problems that the students expressed in the interview, the learning processes raised from Albert Bandura's cognitive social theory and the established guidelines of contents from the area of environmental education for the fourth grade. By testing these sequences, it was demonstrated the effect on students for the achievement of competencies of awareness, self-reflection, self-control, teamwork, problem solving and responsibility, challenges that environmental education should achieve in future generations. This study also shows that the incidence of school education and the formation in the family of formal environmental knowledge, have a positive effect on children if it is done in a constant way, otherwise it does not generate motivation to carry out daily practice and show behaviors in the care of the environment.