bemoreeco

Trying to be good at home with eco tips is hard, but with 3 active kids at school I feel it is important that this if followed through at school. Then I found that Beth Lewis at About.com has the same environmental concerns when choosing to run a visibly Green Classroom. These are her tips;

1. Make sure that paper and aluminum can recycling boxes are always available in your classroom. Actively promote their use. If you see someone throwing something away, remind him or her about recycling.
2. Use a reusable water bottle, rather than throw-away plastic bottles. Encourage your students to do the same. Perhaps you could even organize a bulk purchase of reusable bottles, gathering $10 from parents and procuring the bottles for your classroom.
3. Place the recycling symbol on the walls of your classroom.
4. When a students ask you if it’s OK for them to throw away specific papers (like an old math test, for example), consistently respond, “Sure. You can recycle them.”
5. If you have student jobs, perhaps one of the jobs could be “recycling monitor.” This person would be in charge of making sure that people are recycling instead of throwing items into the regular trash. Also, this person might be in charge of taking the recycling boxes to the school’s recycling center, if applicable.
6. Encourage children to pick up trash around the school grounds. Perhaps if your students are acting antsy one afternoon, take a ten minute clean-up stroll around the campus before you get back to the learning at hand.
7. Decorate your classroom with plants and flowers. Also, students can plant their own seeds in the beginning of the year and watch their plants thrive as the year progresses.
8. Creatively minimize the amount of paper used in your classroom, without compromising educational objectives, of course. When you save a little paper, make a comment like, “We can save paper by doing it this way.”

It’s easier than you might think to set up and run a Green Classroom. Please forward this to your school or ask your child to print this off and place in their school bag. For the full article by Beth Lewis <click here>