The purpose of the article is to evaluate the effectiveness of the extracurricular activity program "Eco-friend of our school" for the formation of the foundations of the ecological and patriotic culture of younger schoolchildren. The article presents the experience of introducing the program into the extracurricular activities of younger schoolchildren (organized on the basis of the innovative regional educational platform of the «Secondary School No. 60» named after Hero of the Soviet Union P.F. Batavin in the 2022-2023 academic year) during the solution of project tasks: "We decided to build a house", "Festival of Children's Ecological Theaters", "School of Good Deeds", "Portrait of the hometown". The article substantiates the need to focus on the development of the patriotic component in the structure of the ecological and patriotic culture of the representatives of the younger generation. A significant basis of the work is the modeling of the image of the house, school, city and small homeland with the orientation of the younger student to the image of a patriot with his inherent qualities (the desire to perform socially significant functions in the family, school community, in various spheres of society, to protect nature, high spirituality). The semantic field of the concept of "ecological and patriotic culture" is analyzed. It is revealed that the proposed program of extracurricular activities can be considered effective due to qualitative changes in the personality of a younger student as a result of complex diagnostics ("AESOP" V.A. Yasvina, D.V. Grigoriev's method of diagnostics of personal growth, the method "Who am I?" (modification of M. Kuhn's method)), the study of the art of younger schoolchildren).