Teachers, create a free login at Blooket.com.
Then invite students to go to the website https://play.blooket.com/ and log in with the game code Blooket generates for you.
Blooket game created by me and can be found here: https://dashboard.blooket.com/set/69baacc06b519e9ae3abb824
It's Earth Month, so what better time to get your declutter on and go knee-deep-in reducing, reusing, and recycling!
I recently spent about 11 hours over the course of a weeekend doing just that--tho maybe more like neck-high-in!
My mission: to purge two 4-drawer file cabinets and a dozen tubs and boxes in my garage. Lighten up and make space.
The contents: 30+ years of teaching materials.
Having been a teacher since the fall of 1991 (with the exception of one year between schools where I was moving, pregnant, and having my first child), I've accumulated and created a lot of materials over the years. The majority of my career has been in homeroom classrooms in about 6 different elementary schools. Ten of the last 11 years, the majority of these teacher materials have been living in my garage--untouched as I moved from teaching 3rd grade (or 2nd... or Kindergarten... or 5th grade) to teaching Technology.
In this day and age, files are definitely more digital than anything, and it was time to "let go." No, not retiring yet, but my garage certainly was getting out of hand--just ask my husband! Plus I was settling on the answer of "no" to these questions: "Would I want to go back to a regular homeroom classroom? Would I ever use all of this again, even if I did?"
11 hours of purging about 33 years of materials gives you a lot of time to trip down memory lane. Upon pulling open the first file drawer, I had a pang. Did I really want to do this? I was thinking about the blood, sweat, toil, tears, and lamination/creation time I was about to get rid of. Yes, I'm doing this. It's time to reduce, reuse (via donation), and recycle!
7 garbage bags, 2 filled large yard lidded-recycle bins, at least a dozen bags and boxes of paper stacks of files to recycle, 20 or more dead binders that housed teaching units, and a half a dozen boxes of books to donate, I was in a lighter place.
Yes--I got to see windows into each and every school I have taught.
Yes--there's a lot of money that I have put into my teaching career.
The biggest yes--there's a lot of irony in recycling binders of environment and green school lesson plans a couple weeks before Earth Day. The "circularity" was striking, though maybe not picture perfect when describing the circular economy of true sustainability. But I did mentally hear the "Circle of Life" song from the Lion King going through my mind.
But, also yes--all of this served me at its time. It was there when I needed it. It all helped mold me into the teacher I am today.
And yes--some of the items (ditto copied resources and even transparency overlays from my early days in mid-1990s teaching) should have already been long gone. Maybe, just maybe, I've been an organized hoarder--or at least compiler of teaching materials. I was "curating" long before Pinterest even thought of it. Mine was just the file cabinet version.
The true moment of circularity for me came when my mission was completed and I realized there were far too many materials to put all out at the curb. Boxes of paper won't weather well when setting them out the night before an early trash/recycling pick up the next day. Given that, I loaded my dozen boxes into the back of the car and trekked to the local recycling center. Up and over the ledge into their bin all the boxes went.
A neat field trip we once took at the Maryland Green School I used to work at was to the local landfill and recycling center. I definitely flashed back as my files when floating in the bin.
Yes, full circle.
Graphic from https://www.pactcollective.org/pactresources/circularity, other images from my camera.
“Education is the key to unlocking the world, a passport to freedom.”
Image created in Canva.com using a quote from UC San Diego's website: https://undergrad.ucsd.edu/programs/jtccer.html#For-Students--JTCCER-Course-Off, Oprah quote from https://www.cosmopolitan.com/college/a33261416/best-college-quotes/, Problem solver image from https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/er-2021-0040
I ran into this quote the other day and it really spoke to me.
Like most teachers, I love learning new things. I also often teach a class or two in the summer. This year, I co-taught a class called "Walk on the Wild Side: Integrating Environmental Education in Your Classroom" with an Upper School Science teacher. We taught it in Summer of 2019, and rebooted it this year. One of the fun perks is that we have all of the participants bring their bikes and we bike the 2+ miles between campuses on the community bike trail and picnic and geocache about halfway along the way.
An atlas of maps.
I've written about our Maryland Green School recertification process a time or two. Given the process parameters of what you need to do, it's certainly a daunting task. It was one I spent hours upon hours on, and that was with a committee of folks working alongside of me to help gather our 4 years of data, checking boxes as we went.
I alluded to the fact a week or so ago that I had been knee deep during the last few months working on our Maryland Association of Environmental & Outdoor Education [MAEOE] Green School recertification. Our school was initially certified in 2016, and given it's a 4 year process, we were back in business this fall and winter collecting data and navigating the MAEOE checklist.
Objective 1: Systemic Sustainability
In the world of innovation, it only makes sense that STEM and environmentalism pair together in the classroom. Sometimes called E-STEM, this pairing of eco-education and the science, technology, engineering, and math fields fits just as nicely as STEAM (A = Art) or STEEM (The additional E is Entrepreneurship). Given the breadth of environmentalism, it's more than just the "science." It's going to be the innovation that "stems" from the all the STEM subjects combined that will solve our world's problems!
Mama Duck is a smart cookie. For the 5 years I've been teaching at my current school, a majority of these years she's decided every spring to lay her eggs in a secure, small courtyard within the walls of our building. Add on, she's got a history that is longer than mine at the school. Two years, she also made our campus her egg-laying home, however she branded out, once outside the Fifth Grade classroom (NOT a great plan, as it led to the Great American Duck Rescue of 2017 as the nest was right next to a drainage pipe, leading to a resident drainage pond). Last year, I think Mama Duck made her home on campus again, but near a more open water retention ditch.
The books I read often shape the posts I write here. My latest: Marc Bekoff's 2014 book Rewilding Our Hearts: Building Pathways of Compassion and Coexistence. Marc Bekoff might not be a household name, but he's got a litany of credentials: Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, scientist, ethologist, behavioral ecologist, author (of 31 books and 1000+ articles), and a person who's made his life mission one to study animal ethics and human behavior.
During an Earth Day lesson this week this week with first graders, I told them that Earth Day was my favorite holiday. I left out the part about my teaching experience at previous school that was über environmental. I also left out the part about writing an eco blog for the past 9+ years. But they got the impassioned point, none the less, and who knows, maybe they could guess the rest.
Earth Day, just like your birthday, is annually on April 22nd. This year, Earth Day turns 49. The 2019 theme: Protect Our Species.
Project Learning Tree is NOT just for Halloween STEM Activities. 
Once, a long time ago (about 7 years), I helped to build a green roof, on the roof of the greenest school in the world. Unfortunately, about 4.5 years that school shut down. It still breaks my heart.
