CGS Celebrates Earth Day All Week Long!
Our CGS students and community are raising awareness to the environmental issues all week long! Our teachers Jessi and Akira brainstormed some wonderful activities around sustainability and stewardship for all of our students to participate in. This Earth Week for CGS was geared towards asking the students to think about “What is something small that we can do to help our earth?”, because small actions over time can create big impacts.
In each classroom the students were tasked to create their own compost bins with new class pets: worms! Composting food scraps and what we call yard “waste” helps our environment thrive and worms are natures best composters. At the beginning of the week students worked together to prepare a compost bin from start to finish full of soil, decomposable items like shredded paper, banana peels, tops of strawberries, other food scraps, and of course the earths hard working composters, worms. The students were also encouraged to add in other items like a plastic cap, or piece of metal, so that at the end of the week, they could review all the items in their composting bin to see what is good and compostable for the earth or not.
We also had an Earth activist author join us as a special guest for a reading and book signing. Alicia Carbo-Guha is an author and illustrator who read her book, Saving Nature, to our SK to Grade 4 students. This is a story about 3 children who are always hearing adults talk about the environment, but don’t understand what it really means. They meet a robot named Buku who gives them more context and helps them understand how they can take action and make a difference. Carbo-Guha was inspired to write this story based off of her life experience growing up and seeing different parts of the world cluttered in landfills, or oceans she had once swam in overflowing with floating waste and toxic wastes. She became so downhearted about the ever-growing pollution to our Earth, and thus, her story was born. The students were very excited and thankful for this special visitor where they expanded their knowledge about the importance of keeping our earth clean.
The school and CGS community also took part in a few other ongoing Earth Day initiatives over the week. Students and CGS Families were encouraged to donate dried, old, used markers and writing utensils for our Dried Writing Utensil Supply Drive where we will be donating these materials to Terracycle at Staples, where they will recycle, reuse and refill them. Everyone was also encouraged to bring in any old, ripped, faded clothing, not able to be reused or donated as the school is collecting these to be donated to Markham Textile Recycling.
We ended the week with an Earth Day Pledge for each classroom, and a Green Party! Each classroom was asked to create a pledge of a few different ways how they will make Earth Day every day. Each classroom also celebrated our amazing Earth with a green inspired party!
CGS hopes that all of our collective small actions blossomed some new ideas for how our CGS Community all can do a little something together to do our part in keeping our Earth clean, and help save our Earth not just on Earth Day, but every day.
