I am one of those Earth Day people that loves the idea of Earth Day, have always done something special on the day but never really took the initiative to pull a group together and do a clean-up... until yesterday!
At a school meeting I realized that our school wasn't going to do anything for Earth Day, mostly because it came on a day that my son's school was on Spring Break, but I still thought we could do something. So I chirped up... and said that I would pull something together.
I got really into it and had the history of Earth Day together, I had a composter on-hand to explain about composting and show the kids how it was done, and I had pulled together some small projects (a recycled bird feeder and some plantings to take home) AND we were going to go out and clean up the school grounds! Well the time came and the kids were so excited to clean up that all I could do is give them a bit of history and then I decided that we should take to the grounds... We collected SO MUCH garbage! It was really exciting to see the kids really into the task!
I am telling you this because I want you to know how EASY this little project is and it was such a big hit at my son's school! When we were finished we got to look at our heaps of garbage, and each of the kids talked about what they were going to do on the REAL Earth Day, April 22nd -- clean up, plant trees, start a family compost (okay I was kind of pushing this one!) and one kid said that he was going to plant TWO trees! ha!
The whole thing really took nothing... I got the kids some cheap work gloves so that they had something to take home, a reminder to clean up on Earth Day, we used recycled grocery bags and I got the Earth Day history (which is really fun) on the earthday.org website.
In 1985, when I worked for Esprit in San Francisco we went to the beach and cleaned up. I remember we had about eight things to choose from, some people went to work for Habitat for Humanity, etc... I will never forget this and doing this project as part of my job at the time (we were paid for the day) I thought was really inspiring (thank you for that Esprit!).
I hope that this inspires you to pull together an Earth Day at your school, and if not this year then next year!! Just do it... it's a lot of fun!
