Salford Hills celebrates Earth Day traditions
To promote environmental appreciation, Salford Hills Elementary School students participated in arts and crafts. The school celebrated Earth Day on April 21.
In order to promote environmental conservation, Salford Hills Elementary School celebrated Earth Day through a variety of activities and arts and crafts on April 21.
According to fifth grade teacher Janet Smith, the first thing she tells her kids before Earth Day is that everyone can make a change.
“Sometimes we see problems, or things we would like to change with the world and we think ‘That’s so huge. I’ll never be able to figure it out,’ but really it just takes one person stepping up,” Smith said.
When one person makes a change, other people will soon follow, and in that way, a small change can turn into a large change, Smith said.
Smith believes that the Earth Day message resonates with younger students more because it is their first time learning about the importance of preserving nature, and it makes them feel a sense of personal responsibility.
According to Smith, while there were not any school-wide plans to celebrate the day, almost every teacher took it upon themselves to create some kind of connection between education and our planet.
Teachers did this through arts and crafts with reusable plastics and connecting Earth Day messages to language arts and science.
The kindergarten class celebrated Earth Day by creating instruments out of recycled plastics.
For example, kindergartener Franco Scicchitano made a maraca out of an old soup bottle.
Learning about Earth Day encouraged some kindergarteners to think about the cleanliness of the planet.
“I like picking up things that hurt the Earth,” kindergartener Henry Neff said.
Kindergartener Gavin Vesci agrees.
“My favorite thing about Earth Day is keeping our world clean,” Vesci said.
According to kindergartener Emerson Woite, people celebrate Earth Day because “
we like keeping the Earth clean.”
Vesci said people celebrate because “we want the Earth to be beautiful.”
Some elementary school students appreciate Earth’s wildlife and recognize the damage that pollution can cause to animals.
“If you are throwing out trash, it ends up in the ocean and pollutes it, which hurts all the animals there,” second-grader Harlow Smith said.
Second-grader Nolan Bollinger agrees that trash we throw away can harm the marine environment.
“We recycle so our trash does not go in the ocean,” Bollinger said.
According to Smith, instead of throwing out all of our trash, we can recycle it and use it for something else.
The second grade class made models of the Earth using clay.
In the fourth and fifth grade challenge room, students studied the food chain and made art projects resembling the chain.
Due to the variety of educational activities on Earth Day, students have come to enjoy the day.
“I love Earth Day,” fourth-grader Nyla McKeon said. “It’s one of my favorite days.”
Smith said that many older elementary school students appreciate Earth Day because students are starting to work with pencil and paper more often instead of doing arts and crafts, so having a “special day” can be meaningful and fun.
Fifth-grader Blake Spencer said he “loves the extravagant colors” of the Earth Day food chain project.
For fourth-grader Bryce Everitt, the best part of the day is seeing other people picking up trash around him because it inspires him to pick up trash as well.
Everitt also enjoyed learning about the food chain on Earth Day and the importance of a keystone species for the success of any ecosystem.
