Environmental awareness need not be dour. Incorporating green activities can be both enlightening and entertaining, ensuring that the lesson and lifestyle becomes permanent. In particular, use interdisciplinary activities to teach environmentalism and engage the whole family, office, or school group with an array of interests and abilities.
Recycling Contests
Compete to see which group can save the most recyclable items, recommends the website TeachingTips.com. Name the teams, appoint judges and designate green awards. By trying to accumulate more and challenging the validity of items like plastic containers, students will understand not only the vast scale of items usually tossed into landfills but also the value of individual contributions on collective environmental efforts.
Making Paper
Create your own paper, suggests the website EduBook.com. Tear old newspapers into small pieces, then pulverize with water in a blender. Pour the mixture over a wire screen, which can be made ahead of time by stapling screen mesh onto scraps of plywood.
Spread out the mixture and let it dry outdoors or in the warmest, driest area of the room. The final product will be bumpy, irregular and grey, perfect for your next writing or drawing assignment. This can inspire a discussion of how many chemicals and machines are involved in making uniformly thin, white paper.
Temporary Burying
Bury a vegetable such as lettuce inside a plastic bag, recommends EduBook.com. Let it remain in the earth for at least a month, then retrieve the bag, and notice how the lettuce is no longer visible, as it is biodegradable. Taking this lesson to the scale of landfills, ask students to envision what happens to several tons of plastic after it is buried in the earth. Teachers can also discuss how non-degradable objects can also release fumes or chemicals or otherwise change the nature of the soil and water.
Sparing the Toilet
Let your children urinate outdoors at night, suggests the website PeeOutside.org, provided they are on their own property and in a private setting. The group notes that each toilet flush uses about three gallons of water. Alternatively, individuals can simply reduce toilet flushing at home, letting "yellow go mellow", as opposed to "flushing brown down" the drain. Nothing like a rhyme to encourage kids to commit an action to memory!
Member Comments