Monmouth County, NJ - Middletown Village Elementary students continued their Earth Day celebrations with a plant sale for Mother's Day on Friday May 7. The School's PFA volunteers hosted the sale for the children to purchase potted flowers, herbs, vegetables and garden accessories, reinforcing the environmental lessons from Earth day, and math skills.
Is it possible to go entirely paperless for a day? Students, faculty and staff at Middletown Village Elementary School, dressed in green, blue and white to signify the earth's colors, took the challenge and reduced their paper use by 99% on Earth Day during the school's day-long celebration putting the 3Rs of reduce, reuse and recycle into real-life practice. The day began with students reciting an Earth Day Pledge and signing Happy Birthday to Earth Day to honor its 40th observance and ended with everyone's renewed commitment to take care of Planet Earth.
"We've already gone green with all our communications sent via email, but we still need to consider more ways each person can make simple daily contributions to reduce our reliance on our planet's precious resources", said Principal Karen Zupancic. Students generated ideas including turning off lights, opening up the blinds, putting on a sweater instead of raising the heat, and using whiteboards in lieu of paper. "In the days leading up to Earth Day, our students created many of the activities today showing us how to live the 3Rs daily", Mrs. Zupancic, said.
Within the classrooms parents assisted with activities such as reusing soda to build terrariums that will be monitored during science classes, building birdfeeders from used milk bottles and creating a collage depicting the map of the USA from recycled snack bags. Throughout the day the teachers facilitated lessons about the environment via hands-on projects incorporated into each subject.
