Earth Day 2015

There are 3 recesses a day at our school, and I'm on duty for every single one. So for one hour each day, I'm outside watching the kids and monitoring their playground activities and behavior. Accidents frequently happen outside, and there's a lot of cuts and scrapes that occur during recess. But one day in April, there was an accident that was so much worse. As I blew the whistle to signal the end of lunch recess, and as kids started running in to line up by the doors of the building, one kid had a stick in his hand, and he threw it, and it accidentally went through the eye of another student who was heading to the line-up area. The student's eye was bleeding, and he was taken to the hospital. My heart felt heavy for weeks, because I felt like there was more that I could've done to prevent the situation. The previous day, I'd been on the grass and noticed all the sticks on the ground that had fallen from the big tree in a recent wind storm, and I'd thought to myself "I should pick these up, because they could hurt someone", but logistically I knew I didn't have enough time right then to do it: there was only 2 minutes left of recess, and I had somewhere I needed to be immediately following recess, and the garbage can is nowhere near the grass area. But sure enough, the very next day it happened--someone was seriously hurt because of a stick. The accident did permanent damage to the boy's eye, and I was deeply saddened that an accident so severe happened while at school. I felt like I needed to do something--I prayed and prayed for that little boy and his family, and I took action at recess: I finally did what I should've done prior to the accident. The day immediately following the accident, I carried the garbage can over to the grass at the beginning of recess, and about 12 kids helped me pick up all the sticks we could find on the grass and we threw them all away. The next week was Earth Week, so I thought to myself: why stop there?! So on Monday, I carried over the garbage can again, and the same group of kids helped me pick up all the trash that had blown around and was stuck all along the fence surrounding the grass. On Tuesday and Wednesday, more kids joined the effort and we swept and picked up rocks that had fallen out of the giant box surrounding the big and small toy equipment.

And on Thursday, after all our clean-up efforts on the playground, we beautified the black top by coloring on it with sidewalk chalk. The maintenance worker Bobby gave me two big boxes of blue and white chalk that he had in storage, because he remembered that in previous years on Earth Day, I always took my music classes to clean up the sidewalks around the school and draw on them with chalk. I was kind of sad that I couldn't do that tradition this year in music class (since I no longer teach music), but I was so glad that he offered the chalk to me so that we could do it at recess instead! Unfortunately, I didn't realize that that exact Thursday was going to be the day that everyone in the school received their new white t-shirts to wear for school pride, and the blue chalk wasn't the best choice to use while wearing new bright white shirts! But I'd promised the kids all week long that on Thursday we would be using the sidewalk chalk, so I didn't want to go back on my word. At the end of first recess, the kids all had to go inside to wash their hands (because I told them not to wipe their hands on their clothes, but unfortunately some kids did). But I went home at lunch and got some wet wipes, so at the end of last recess, they used those to clean their hands after drawing with chalk and it worked so much better. We had a lot of fun at recess that day and seeing the black top covered in colorful drawings made my heart so happy!

There were a lot of pictures of earth, flowers, and suns. It was so cheery!

One kindergartener drew this "cat in the hat".
The hat was SUPER long, and it had an awesome AB pattern
of blue and white stripes on it! I thought it was so creative! 

One of the things that Kanyon drew was this fish.