Strange but True: This is what can happen when adults set up opportunities for kids to serve the school and community within the school day. I vow to focus on this this year!
- Tell 11 year olds to clean their rooms and you get long faces, sighs, and often uncleaned rooms. (Impacts only the child and parent/teacher)
- Tell 11 year olds to go outside the school walls together (social) and pick up as much trash as possible to keep it out of the streams, rivers, and oceans and well, you get get kids exploding out the doors with energy, enthusiasm, and vigor. Say what?
(They can impact more than just themselves and parents/teachers. They can interact with their classmates and talk,
observe, and problem solve; participate in an event that impacts others; find ‘biggest’ piece of trash or most trash.)
Watch these VIDEO clips of my 6th graders to see for yourself. You might get a chuckle out of this.
Note the level of enthusiasm and effort by kids. There’s something good about serving others. We need to set up more of these opportunities for kids at school. (Is it a TV or a MONITOR? LOL)
GenerationOn website We picked Operation H2O from the Teen tab as the inspiration for the community service. There is a stream in the woods by our school. We have not started the actual service learning part of it yet. Students will be choosing service learning projects from here 3rd quarter (classroom set of iPads starting 3rd qtr) and taking off on them. They can choose projects around topics that matter to them.
Generation On Service Certificate for kids I print these for the kids as we do service.
I created a service club for my school on GenerationOn.org. I log our total hours and more data.
We will move from doing COMMUNITY SERVICE to SERVICE LEARNING by doing some of the following:
- Separating trash into biodegradable vs. not, organic vs inorganic, plastics #1-#7, and more.
- Mass of trash
- Volume of trash
- Observe/note path of water erosion on property
- Set out a piece of trash and mark it. Plot where it ends up each day. What forces moved it there? Why did it go THERE and not elsewhere?
- Talk to school district and news reporters about findings
- Create PSA’s
- Create a plan for keeping the stream in these woods clean year-round.
Pictures from our five 30 minute service sessions in September and October.
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| Posing after trash pickup on day 1 out of 5 so far! (Went out 2 days in September and 3 in October so far.) |
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| Coming up the hill and out of the woods with their haul! (September 2012) |
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| Look at all the bags of trash in just 25-30 minutes. 2 barrels in one day. Look at the smiles; pride in helping and BEING a part of this activity. |
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| Is it a TV or a monitor? LOL |
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| The trash haul after the 1st two days (30 minute sessions) of trash pickup on school grounds; serving the school! Yes, there is that 1988 Commodore monitor. LOL |
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| There’s a helmet in here! (October) |
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| They found a dented bat! They used this as a tool to pry a tire out of the ground. |
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| Check out the tire the kids pulled out of the ground in the woods; first of 3 tires they’ve found. |
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| Wow. Big haul. |
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| Lots of plastic (that is made to be used once and then recycled or into landfills) and also metal mattress springs. |
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| We filled 2 more barrels in 30 minutes (October). The kids will be calculating total volume for the 5 pickup days via Mr. Rhode, our math teacher, during 1st hour! Team teaching with both classes and teachers. (Math and Science) We will see what else the kids want to record, calculate as well. |