We started off after lunch by just talking about Earth Day-what it is, what it means, why we celebrate it. I was pleasantly surprised by all the information that the students already knew about Earth day, protecting the earth and our environment, and why it is important. They understood that we were wearing green and blue because it represents the plants and water which are important things to keep clean and safe because we need them. This was really good because we've been learning about plants, what plants need to live and how people use plants so they had a lot of background to connect to. Most importantly we need to "keep our earth pretty and clean!"
We did a little comparison of earth and our houses because we all live on the earth so it's like one gigantic house. The students were sharing what they thought about a house that had trash all over the floor, "yucky stuff" in the water and air (they didn't like the idea of showering or taking baths even more than they normally do), and other problems that are happening to the earth. It was so funny to see how excited and grossed out they got by all of this, and that a lot of the really got the connection between a house we live in and the earth as a really big version of that.
We read the book The Lorax together, and though many of them have seen the new movie, they didn't know the original book. As I was reading we spent a lot of time stopping to talk about what was happening, how the environment was changing in the pictures and the descriptions, why it was changing, what that meant, and more. It had such great visuals of how the same piece of land looked before the Once-ler arrived and the slow transition to dark and gray and dirty after he had made his factory. They were so engrossed in the story even though it took a much longer time to read than normally holds their attention. At times the students were so excited about wanting to make a comment about something in the story or a connection to Earth day and the story they looked as if they would explode. We also spent some time talking about the Once-ler, how he was treating the animals, the Lorax, the trees, and the land around him. We focused so much on what the Once-ler did, how it affected the land, air, and water, and how that affected the animals so they could see the connections. I was surprised by how well they were able to understand what was happening and that they were so disgusted by what was going on, they were yelling at the Once-ler and saying how he was so bad and they don't like him.
After we talked about why we read the Lorax for Earth day. The students came up with great connections and understood that it's important to keep the earth clean, to plant plants, to not litter, etc. They even started comparing what was happening in the book to our own earth unprompted, saying that it's like when we leave trash on the ground it's bad for the earth and the animals might eat it and die! (They all got very into the birds dying thing and kept coming up with ways to help the earth so that our birds don't die and "real" stories of when they saw birds eat trash on the ground and die or the bird flew into dirty air and died- hey, at least they're concerned about the birds and see a connection between actions of people and the effect on animals!)
We finished by talking about what the Lorax would want us to do or not want to do, like he would not want us to litter, make the earth messy. He would want us to pick up trash, plant new plants, and take care of our earth. I asked them if they wanted to help our earth just like the Lorax and they were SO excited to go outside and pick up the trash from our playground. I was a little worried because I figured they were just excited to go out and play (even though that wasn't the point) but not a single one of them was playing on the playground or running around. They were all almost fighting over the pieces of trash to collect as many as they could. They all wanted to show off how much they picked up and didn't want to come in when the day was over because "there's still trash to clean up!" They were also frustrated when they looked outside of our playground area at the front of the school or other playground and couldn't go there to get the trash. A few of them even asked if we could do this every single day!
We came in and talked about how we want to be like the Lorax and protect our earth, so their job was go home and talk to family and friends about what they do to help our earth so the next day we can come up with some ideas to help the Lorax even more the next day.
Will post pics of their Lorax craft where they are drawing/writing about how to save the earth and share some of the ideas we came up with!
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