Naturalist Quarterly, October/November 2008, Vol. 34, No. 6
GreenKids: Turning a Sense of Wonder into a Sense of Empowerment
By Gregg Trilling & Lisa Alexander
Four short years ago, ANS education leaders began thinking about what they could do to bring lasting improvement to environmental education. They conceived the idea of having naturalists work with students and teachers in the schools over the long-term to provide formative, hands-on environmental education experiences. Thus, GreenKids was born. What started as a three-school pilot quickly became a full-fledged partnership with Montgomery County Public Schools and superintendent Dr. Jerry Weast.
The program now boasts 22 schools, with more waiting in the wings. GreenKids schools partner with ANS for two years. Upon graduation from the program, schools join the GreenKids Network, an alumni program being launched this year. Embarking on its fourth school year, GreenKids — and its educators, schools, and students — now heads in inspiring new directions. Partnerships abound between GreenKids schools and local businesses, agencies, and organizations. And GreenKids students and teachers have rolled up their sleeves to address local environmental problems.
A PROGRAM EVOLVES
From the beginning, the GreenKids team realized that children’s enthusiasm for environmental activities went beyond getting a break from the classroom routine. Students were keenly interested in environmental issues—even when they didn’t fully understand them. Students saw first-hand how wildlife habitat was being lost, trash was accumula-ting in streams, and vehicles were clogging the roadways. Youngsters followed controversies over local development, read news about global warming, and watched as Olympic officials worried about smog over Beijing. Students were concerned, but more important, they expressed a strong desire to make a difference.
GreenKids has evolved into a program that links hands-on activity to personal action. This question has become an integral part of every GreenKids lesson: “What can you, as students, do to help solve these problems?”
To study stream health, students muddied their hands with landscape models and stained their fingers with natural dyes. They staged mock floods to simulate litter flowing downstream. GreenKids naturalists asked kids to connect classroom activities to what is happening in their local streams. As a result, students took action during GreenKids-led Stream Study Days. They picked up pounds of litter from local streams, removed invasive plants, and planted native ferns to reduce erosion.
When a teacher requested help with atmospheric studies, GreenKids jumped at the opportunity. Inspired by the EPA’s Charlie Garlow, GreenKids wrote a script for students to act out the carbon cycle, street theater-style. Global Warming Theater took center stage to help students understand the power of the sun, the greenhouse effect, and global warming. An early version of the play ended with carbon rapidly building up in the atmosphere. Unsatisfied with this sad ending, GreenKids naturalist Gina Riazi asked classes to write a final scene in which personal actions restored a balance of carbon in the atmosphere. Students and teachers loved the idea and began taking action. Global Warming Theater led to a No Idling Zone campaign for cars and buses at one GreenKids school. At another, students created energy conservation posters and even won the “Watts Up?” poster contest sponsored by Montgomery County Schools’ Eco-Response Team.
ENGAGING COMMUNITY PARTNERS
Students weren’t the only ones making connections. GreenKids began working with partners to more fully engage schools in community projects. GreenKids schools competed to collect the most acorns and native tree nuts for the Potomac Conservancy’s Growing Native program. Through the Pounds per Kid contest, GreenKids students gathered hundreds of pounds of acorns and nuts to be sprouted at state nurseries across Maryland. The seedling trees will be planted along Maryland waterways to restore forest buffer zones.
Nut collection became a springboard to GreenKids lessons on watershed health. Using the 3-D Enviroscapes model, students made it rain and watched pesticide and herbicide-laden runoff head toward waterways. They observed how trees protect water from pollution. GreenKids worked with the Apache Corporation, the Potomac Conservancy, and Tree-Mendous Maryland to deliver hundreds of trees for students to plant during Arbor Day and Earth Day celebrations. Also, GreenKids encouraged students and their families to participate in tree-planting events throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
More connections! RainScapes, a program from Montgomery County’s Department of Environmental Protection, gave GreenKids materials to illustrate how paved surfaces speed up water run-off and result in scoured-away river banks. In classrooms, students set up erosion experiments, made predictions, and observed results. Like good scientists, youngsters argued about their findings and how they related to the world outside. Classes surveyed schoolyards to observe relationships between paved surfaces (and foot traffic!) and schoolyard erosion. Then, as empowered citizens, students fixed the problems they identified. They built rain barrels and installed glorious, plant-filled rain gardens to reduce erosion on school grounds.
“The GreenKids program brought the vision and focus we needed to our environmental program,” said Eunice Chu, GreenKids Lead Teacher at Chevy Chase Elementary. “Not only did students and teachers increase their awareness of the environment, but they also learned how practical actions today can have a significant impact for the future.”
At East Silver Spring Elementary School, a cross-generational partnership developed between students and residents of Riderwood retirement community. Seniors and primary school children collaborated to create a gorgeous butterfly garden in a previously barren courtyard.
“Riderwood folks, whose average age is about 84, found a way to support GreenKids by purchasing plants for second graders to plant in a butterfly garden and raising funds to augment the program,” said Riderwood resident Becky Hedin. “Residents who visited our special school were able to meet the young students and their teachers, and see [and even work in] the lovely garden.”
Riderwood quilters transcribed nature observations to quilt squares, then raffled off the quilt to benefit GreenKids and the East Silver Spring butterfly garden project.
“When the quilt was displayed in the four clubhouses, almost 3,000 residents had a chance to think about the natural environment and learn about the fantastic GreenKids program,” said Hedin. “The whole project helped our older generation realize that sharing our environmental concerns is truly an intergenerational task, and we could see first-hand that GreenKids is making a real impact on what’s happening with tomorrow’s leaders.”
ACTION FOR THE FUTURE
Everywhere we look, we see evidence of GreenKids schools taking action. GreenKids students at Rock Creek Forest Elementary helped Governor Martin O’Malley launch Maryland’s Bay Fund Tax Check-Off to encourage state residents to donate money to protect the Chesapeake Bay.
Congressman John Sarbanes and students from GreenKids Westland Middle School introduced the No Child Left Inside legislation that seeks to boost federal funding for environmental education.
Students partnered with the Bethesda-based company Honest Tea and Washington Capitals hockey player Matt Bradley for a Cap Collection to remove plastic bottle caps from the solid waste stream. (Happily, Montgomery County recently expanded its recycling program to include bottle cap collection.)
Where will GreenKids go next? As the new school year begins, Takoma Park Middle School teacher Becca Epling reports that, because of GreenKids, “Sixth graders at TPMS are very excited about participating in our recycling program, and students at all grade levels are working hard to make TPMS a school that is even greener than green!”
Takoma Park is one of ten schools that has graduated from the initial two-year program cycle. Each of those schools has received the Maryland Green School Certification from the Maryland Association for Environmental and Outdoor Education. This is no small feat. (To learn more, visit www.maeoe.org/greenschools.) Two GreenKids schools are mid-cycle, and another ten have just begun.
The GreenKids Network will be launched this year to sustain environmental education activity in schools that have completed the program.
GreenKids looks forward to launching new partnerships this year, including one with Trout Unlimited to help students raise and release native fish and another with Glen Echo’s Adventure Theater to organize a school crayon recycling project that will benefit children being treated at the National Institutes of Health.
The GreenKids website will soon help students collaborate on research projects across Montgomery County, while GreenKids high school students will become environmental mentors for elementary school students.
Meanwhile, there are fresh connections to be made and new community partnerships to explore. GreenKids naturalists are busy answering the call of former astronaut Sally Ride and others who, at a recent climate change conference, spoke to teachers about the importance of developing a scientifically and environmentally literate citizenry.
GreenKids has harnessed students’ fascination with the natural world and channeled it into engagement as GreenKids teachers and students tackle local environmental issues. From a sense of wonder to a sense of empowerment, students are moving beyond classroom walls to become citizen scientists who solve environmental problems in their communities. GreenKids is there to lead the way.
Gregg Trilling is a GreenKids environmental education specialist, and Lisa Alexander is the GreenKids director. The cover photo by Dawn Moffitt, GreenKids lead teacher at East Silver Spring Elementary School, shows one generation of GreenKids students lending helping hands for a new generation of oak trees to be planted along Maryland waterways.