Environmentally friendly school projects for teachers and parents

Being the good husband of a teacher, when I came across this site I just had to share! The Green School Project is a web resource for teachers (and parents as far as I am concerned) to teach children how to be more environmentally conscious. There are experiments, literature and other web resources to help you teach your kids to be more green!

As an example, they have a lesson plan on decomposition for little kids:

“# Discuss where garbage goes. Most of it ends up in landfills. Discuss what a landfill is and how the earth can only handle so much garbage.
# Have the students brainstorm different items people throw in the garbage.
# Pass out the Will They Change? Worksheet. Explain to the students that they will be creating and observing their own “landfill”. This landfill will be in the bucket of soil or out on the school grounds.
# On the worksheets, have the students draw a picture and label each item that is going to be buried in their landfill. They should then make a prediction of whether they think the item will change or not change if it is buried in the soil for 2 weeks. Define “change” as getting smaller, changing color, changing its shape. (Getting dirt on it should not qualify as a “change”.)
# Bury the items in the bucket or ground.
# After 2 weeks, unearth the items. Have the students complete their worksheets by drawing pictures of what the items look like now and charting whether they have changed or not.
# Discuss how some of the items changed and broke down over time. This is called decomposition and is part of the cycle of life. Items which decompose will usually not harm the earth and can actually help support new life as fertilizer and food. However, the items that did not decompose take up space and can be harmful to the environment. Therefore, recycling these items is more earth friendly. ”

How cool is that? The people that run the site are a membership of schools, libraries, non-profits and businesses that want to reduce waste and clean our environment. They also will pay schools to recycle paper and ink cartridges.

If you know someone with kids or someone who is a teacher, please be sure to let them know about this site, Green School Project. Imagine what we can accomplish if kids start learning this stuff in kindergarten!

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