Earth Day

Today is Earth Day, and as a big lover of the Earth and things residing on it, I decided to plan my lessons all around this lovely day. For the older kids, this entailed calculating our "Ecological Footprints" and talking about our obligation (or lack thereof) to conservation (here's a short version of the Ecological Footprint Calculator that we used in class if you're interested... http://www.ecologyfund.com/ecology/res_bestfoot.html) We had some interesting discussions and I even shamefully showed them the difference in my Ecological Footprint when living here versus living in the United States. With my younger students, I introduced them to the English words related to recycling. We talked about what can and can't be recycled, whether or not it's important, etc. With my 4th graders, we made charts with pictures. We had a "Things that can be recycled" column, and a "Things that can’t be recycled" column. The creativity and out-of-the-box thinking that came with their answers made me laugh to the point of tears when they showed me their pictures. Here's a taste of what they came up with as a class:

Things that CAN be recycled:

- Paper

- Cans

- Plastic water bottles

- Mobile Phones

- Tires

- Playstations (which most just thought was crazy...who on Earth would even consider throwing out a broken PSP!?)

- Magazines

- Wine bottles (because in Hungary 9 times out of 10, a glass bottle will be a wine bottle…which is why I love this place).

- Posters

-This list just gets more boring...they really illustrated their creativity with the other list, so let's get to that...

Things that CAN'T be recycled:

- Apples

- Humans

- Hair

- A teacher

- Hamsters

- Poop (No way was I going to try to explain the way in which this could actually lead to creating something new...jaj)

- Balls (no, not the balls you're thinking of...get your mind out of the gutter)

- Hannah Montana

- Umbrellas

- A sheriff

- Underwear (when I sarcastically suggested giving their underwear to a charity shop, I got a few extreme looks of disgust from the girls for even mentioning it, and I'm pretty sure the boys started to pick a meeting spot in town where they'd gather with their underwear to hand out to homeless people).

- Soup

Those are just a few...hopefully they bring you a laugh. And after you laugh, go give the Earth a little squeeze for being pretty darn awesome.