Sustainable Living Field Trip to Hofstra

During the first two weeks of March, Hofstra University had a sustainable living exhibit. The sixth graders from Roosevelt Children's Academy took a trip to the exhibit one Thursday morning. We learned so much!  We learned about reusable containers and how they help our environment. We learned about composting and the purpose of the worms in compost. We got to hold worms in our hands, look at the picture! We each planted our own vegetable seed to take home with us. They also gave us two plants to care for at our school. We read books about going green, we learned how much energy we could save by bicycling to and from school and we learned so much more. It was a great morning and we are so happy we went. We thank Hofstra for allowing us this opportunity and helping us with this learning experience!

 

   

Sixth Graders at Roosevelt Children’s Academy Simulate a Landfill!

The sixth grade students here in Roosevelt were very confused about what happened to our garbage. The students felt that they threw away so much garbage a day and they did not understand what happened to it all. In technology class with Ms. Gallo the students were asked to bring in some garbage that they would normally throw out. Students brought in plastic bottles, paper dishes, cardboard boxes, plastic silverware, juice pouches, cookie wrappers, an old tee-shirt, clothing tags, and a broken cell phone, lots of paper, pens and pencils. Ms. Gallo brought in food items including a school breakfast, a school lunch, chicken bones, carrots, cucumbers and old cold cuts. We then put all of this garbage in a plastic container. We got some free dirt from a neighbor of our school; we covered the garbage with dirt, closed the container and put it out back. We plan to check back with our landfill in a few months to see what has decomposed and what hasn’t.

Waverly Students Keeping You (Com) Posted

Students at Waverly Park Elementary School have started a compost program.  Science teacher, Susan Lindner, asked some of our 5^th grade students to speak to all the classes about the value of  composting—how it can help reduce garbage, reuse plant material and recycle organic matter back into the soil.  Students then created a large Compost Do’s and Don’ts poster to display over the compost pail at lunchtime.  Students from Grades 1-5 contribute vegetable and fruit leftovers, as well as peels, stems, cores, and rinds.  On different days of the week, at the end of the lunch period, student volunteers take turns bringing the pail outside and depositing the materials in our compost pile.  The materials will eventually decay and become the dark soil material we call compost.  The compost from this pile will be used to enrich the soil of the plants in our 9/11 garden.  It will also create a habitat for the worms that we will feed our school box turtle,

Franklin

 

 

 

Waverly Park Students "Just Do It!"

    First graders at Waverly Park Elementary School in Lynbrook have taken the lead in showing us what to do with those old sneakers we have lying around that can no longer be worn.  Instead of throwing them into the trash, start a collection and donate them to Nike's Reuse a Shoe Program.  The materials in the donated sneakers are recycled into what is known as Nike Grind.  Nike Ground is made of up pieces of the athletic shoes--rubber from the outer sole, foam from the mid sole, and fabric from the upper portion.  Nike Grind is then used to make playing surfaces for playgrounds, fields, tracks, and courts.  Many of these places are created for children whose communities cannot afford to build such facilities.  It takes just 2,500 pairs of shoes to make a playground surface.  But 75,000 pairs are needed to make a running track. 

    Nike started this program about 10 years ago in an effort to look for a way to reduce hundreds of thousands of sneakers ending up in landfills.  So far, it is the only company in the world to reuse the materials in the shoes it makes.  There are many locations to drop off your old athletic shoes--over 100 around the United States.  The Waverly Park students have collected 120 pairs of shoes to donate to the Reuse a Shoe Program.  We hope that we are helping people all around the world by recycling shoes instead of sending them to landfills.  Nike has a great program that could help save the earth and make a better place for athletes young and old. 

For more information, visit www.nikereuseashoe.com

Earth Day Activities 2009

 

 Our class had a very productive and exciting Earth Day this year!  The goal was to provide a variety of interdisciplinary activities for the students to participate in, with the idea that Earth Day should not only be a one day celebration but something that we focus on in our every day lives.  Our class created bumper stickers to raise awareness.  Each student planted flower seeds which will be given as mother's day gifts in May.  We also talked about their carbon footprints, using the website www.kidsfootprint.org , which is a great interactive website for kids (I used my proxima projector and did it as a whole class lesson).  The students then wrote an informative essay about how they can leave a positive footprint on the Earth.  

The students started a recycling center in our classroom, with bins to recycle both paper and plastic. Finally, the students participated in interdisciplinary Earth Day learning centers: math center where they had to graph data for recycling rates of various materials in the United States, reading comprehension center where they had to read a non-fiction piece about a community that recyles and then answer various questions, a science center where the students had to find the volume and mass of a cup of "polluted" water, and a technology center where the students watch a Brain Pop (www.brainpop.com) video about the three c's (conserve, clean up, chime in) and completed a graphic organizer.  Those ideas were used later to create the bumper stickers.