Wow!

What a great success! Are garden is planted and are Earth Week has been going great in the school! Teachers have been using the video streams from discoveryeducation.com, they have been making posters to go up around the school and doing more inside their classroom. I wanted to add a few more pictures from our Monday celebration. Not only was Monday our day for planting but it was also are last Student Council meeting. :( So as interns we also organized a pizza and brownie party for our fabulous members as a nice reward as we decorated some recycling boxes after planting. (That hard work outside does work up a good appetite)  :) It was a great way to not only learn about science and the earth but it was very rewarding to give back to the school that opened their doors to us MSU interns.

Checking out the worms!

Good Teamwork!



Action shot! Intense decorating happening for this recycle box!



Enjoying the pizza :)

See the little flowers from the road! They look good :)

Room 102 Going Green

Ms. Jamie reading a book about recycling to her students

Students working on the recycling sort

Going Green Lesson in Room 102

Today I taught a lesson to my first graders about taking care of the environment. I started out reading the first and fifth chapters of a book called Earth Day: Keeping Our Planet Clean by Elaine Landau. It was all about the pollution that happens to our Earth and how we can take better care of it. Then we had a short discussion about what the students could do to take care of the Earth. Many students said they would recycle paper, clean up the litter in their yard, and ride a bike or walk instead of driving to school.

Students watching a recycling video

After that, we watched a couple videos from http://www.discoveryeducation.com/. Both were called Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The first one showed real children taking care of the Earth by reducing the amount of water they used, reusing papers by drawing on both sides, and recycling items such as cans and bottles. It also mentioned many other ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle. The other video was a short rap about recycling.

After the video, I had my students cut out and sort pictures of objects into categories to show where they would recycle them. The three categories were paper, plastic, and metal. Objects they cut out included: soup cans, pop cans, clothes hangers, water bottles, lined paper, and newspaper. The students had a lot of fun cutting and sorting. We have a paper recycling bin and a plastic recycling bin in our classroom, so it was really cool seeing them make the connection between the sort and our classroom.

Recycling sort

After today, my students seem really pumped about recycling! I am really excited to hear about what they do at home to take care of the earth.

GO GREEN

One more thing, we finished placing our light reminders throughout the whole building. The student council members enjoyed placing these signs by all the light switches and hope that it will help to remind staff and students to GO GREEN!

Earth Day at Alcott

As I was roaming the school this week I saw a lot of classrooms acknowledging and implementing lessons about Earth Day. I was able to stop by some of the classrooms and talk with the students and capture what they were doing.

The first classroom I stopped in was a first grade classroom. The students were drawing and writing about how they could help our Earth. The students were very engaged and loved talking to me about what they could do to help our Earth.

Next I stopped in one of the other kindergarten classrooms. They were all wearing their Earth Day headbands and painting pictures of flowers. Here are some pictures from their classroom.

In my kindergarten classroom the kids also made Earth Day headbands. We also discussed the different ways we can help our Earth! After the students made their headbands they made a book called Hooray For Our Earth!

It was very exciting to see that the teachers were getting involved and helping our students become more aware of their surroundings and what they can do to make a difference. I almost forgot to mention that I saw numerous poster around the hallways about recycling and respecting our Earth. I believe these posters were done by a 2nd or 3rd grade class. They looked GREAT!!! I believe that our research action plan really helped the school become more aware and think about the actions they are taking.

Planting!

On Monday we met with our student council after to school to plant our flowers.  We decided to have them make a sketch of where we should put our plants around the sign.  We told them that we had 4 large plants and 4 smaller plants and it was up to them to decide where we should plant each one.  This is the sketch they came up with:

They decided that it would be best to put the larger plants on the outside edges of the sign so that they don't block any of the words.  It was also decided to have each side look the same. 

After we had our plan we headed out to the sign! It was great to see the kids get so into planting the flowers.  We could tell they really care about the school and wanted to make a positive contribution by the concern they had about where to place the plants, making sure to follow the steps correctly, and the big smiles they had on their faces!

 

 

Alcott Student Council proud of their hard work!

Our principal announced our planting project during the morning announcements today.  One of my students raised their hand and asked why we were doing that.  I took the opportunity to explain that we were helping to beautify our environment as well as provide a food source for butterflies.  This turned into a mini-lesson of brainstorming other things we can do to take care of our earth. They came up with a great list including throwing your trash away in a recycling bin or a trash can instead of on the ground,  helping hurt animals,  and finding trash on the playground. A few students decided that they wanted to plant some flowers or even a tree, too.  I told them that would be a great idea and they should talk with my mentor teacher to see if they could do something on their own.  

Getting Our Plants!

We all took a trip to pick out some flowers today for the sign.  After doing some research on Michigan native plants we had a list of plants we wanted to look for.  We called around to different plant and flower stores to find which places had the plants we needed and could possibly give us a discount.  We decided to head to a local shop, Wojo's.  

With the assistance of the friendly staff we found some great plants that we can't wait to bring back to Alcott.  Unfortunately, there are not many native Michigan plants that attract butterflies available right now.  Most of them bloom in the summer.  However, we were able to get 5 different plants, 2 of which attract butterflies.  We were able to use funds from the Student Council Candy Grams sale along with a generous discount from Wojo's to buy the plants. 



Our plants:
-Yarrow, Michigan native, attracts butterflies
-Helenium Ruby, Michigan native, attracts butterflies
-Euphorbia First Blush, Michigan native
-Euphorbia Bonfire, Michigan native
-Beards Tongue, Michigan native

THANK YOU WOJO'S! :)

Weeding

On Friday we stayed after school to start weeding the area around the sign.  Due to the late approval of the project, we were unable to have students get permission to stay after for this part of the project.  We wanted to get a head start so that the students will be ready to plant on Monday.  We got a lot done before it started raining!

Alcott sign before weeding and planting.

When we took a closer look we saw that there were some dandelions and a lot of  tall grass that needed to be weeded out. 

 Working hard to get ready for planting!

Impact on the school community:


It is nice to see the impact we are already making in the school community.  As we were weeding, one of the teachers at our school stopped as she was leaving and was very happy to see what we were doing and can't wait to see how it looks after Monday.   When I was in the hallway on Friday I heard another teacher telling her students to get excited for next week because they will be learning more about how to help our earth.  We cleaned out our desks at the end of the day and students decided that we could still recycle paper that had been written on and was crumpled up.  I love that they are taking the time to stop and think about recycling instead of just tossing it into the trashcan.  I can't wait to see how else our students and the community will be impacted by our project!

A student stopping to recycle a plastic bottle. 

My classroom now has recycling bins! We have one for plastic and one for paper. The students are excited about them already. I almost threw a paper away the other day and one of the students said "Ms. Jamie! Shouldn't you recycle that?" They are keeping me accountable.

APPROVED

We have finally got confirmation from our principal that we can go ahead with our plan to plant flowers around the school sign. We are all very excited to hear this and are excited for our students to get a chance to get outside and plant the flowers!

WE STARTED OUR PROJECT!

Student council members started to design and make a large bulletin board outside of the cafeteria for all staff and students to see.

We also began to place our light switch reminders around the school! We are hoping that our signs help remind everyone at Alcott to GO GREEN and turn off the lights.

We have a great start to our project but we are having some issues getting approval to plant flowers around the school sign. We are also concerned about the involvement of the other staff members in our initiative to promote students understanding of going green. Our district has laid off many staff members and it is a transitioning time for the school. A lot of changes are being made. We are hoping to hear this week if we can still go ahead with planting flowers around the school sign.

So after thoughtful discussion our Alcott intern group have come up with a plan to complete our research project. To help students learn more about the environment and what it means to be "going green" we decided that we need to do more then just one thing. So here are some of the things that we plan on doing. (We do need to get approval from our school's principal first.)
We will:

• send out to all teachers a fact sheet about Earth Day and Going Green expectations, that also incorporates suggested learning activities that can be implemented into daily lessons throughout the week.
• implement suggested learning activities in our own classrooms. This will include making sure there is a recycling box, turning off the lights when leaving the room, reading books about the environment, turning off lights for at least a half hour when in the classroom, and showing students video streams about being green.
• promote Earth Day by making a bulletin board and posters to be hung up around the school. These posters will explain how to be be green and help our environment. The interns along with student council members will plant flowers, including those native to Michigan, around the building to qualify for another specification made by the Michigan Go Green School Initiative.

So what do you think? Is there anything else we should add or do you think this is a good start? We are open to comments and suggestions.

Welcome! :)

Welcome to our Alcott Going Green Blog! This blog is designed to keep you updated about our Action Research project at Alcott Elementary. Our group's topic is, Promoting Environmental Education and Being a Green School. The purpose of this study is to describe the impact of teaching students about becoming environmentally aware at Alcott Elementary. So please take the time and comment and follow along as we find a way to fulfill our purpose over the next three weeks.