...make it a better place

Last year, I made special lesson plans for all my students in honor of Earth Day, and I really enjoyed it. So for Earth Day this year (April 22), I decided to do it again. I created new lesson plans, and had been preparing in small ways for months in anticipation of Earth Day!

 

I had the Kindergarten students all watch the Sesame Street song "Once is Not Enough" on youtube, and we talked about ways we could re-use products. Then all the Kindergarten students made their own maracas out of reused items: cleaned-out yogurt containers, and lids cut from cereal boxes. They put some beans inside it, and I taped the lid on. They really liked it--and I'm glad, because I've been washing yogurt containers since the beginning of school just to have enough for all of them to have (60 containers!). This is Kanyon with his maraca that he made and got to keep:

 

I did an identical lesson plan for all the students in 1st - 4th grade: First I showed them Michael Jackson's song "Heal the World" on youtube, and then we talked about ways to make the world a better place to live. Then I showed them a few short clips of the movie "Wall-E", and talked to them about ways to beautify our earth now so that it doesn't look like the world that Wall-E lived in. Then I played them one last clip of Michael Jackson's song "We are the world". It was a good musical lesson, and the kids were really receptive to the songs and videos. Then we went outside and I had the kids all clean up some gravel off the sidewalks between my music building and the elementary school. Each class had a designated section that they cleaned up and we swept. Then the students created colorful pictures on the cement in their area with sidewalk chalk. They loved it! It was so fun for them to be outside and have free time to color. Thankfully, the weather turned out nice on both days that we did it for class time. I have a block schedule, so all the students in 1st-4th grade either come on Tuesdays & Thursdays or Mondays & Wednesdays. So, the Earth Day lesson plan was given on Thursday, April 18 to half the students and again on Monday, April 22 (Earth Day) to the other half of the students.

 

 

There's a lot of cement between my music building and the elementary school, and the colors and pictures really brightened up the dull surroundings. Most of that cement is surrounded by gravel beds that are constantly being walked in instead of on the sidewalk, so rocks are always being kicked up onto the sidewalk, and the cement is usually covered in gravel which makes it hard to walk on or have wheelchairs ride on. It was so nice the following week after we did this to have cleared off sidewalks! It made me smile to see such beautiful pictures and have the sidewalks feel clean, and I loved looking at all their colorful drawings as I walked back and forth between the buildings daily. Lots of other adults had the same feeling and made similar comments to me about it, too. There are still a few of the pictures that are visible even now, a month later! (My music building is the peach-colored one on the left, and on the right is the middle school gym:)

 

It felt good to take care of just a tiny piece of this beautiful planet Earth that we are privileged to call our home!