Center for Teaching & Learning

4/26/24 - Environmental Awareness

Hello, CTL Families,
Today’s Earth Day Clean Up has been a wonderful chance to all pull together and freshen up the school’s exterior at the start of spring. I love to see families working together, raking, planting, bagging, all with smiles on their faces. I am always impressed by how hard CTL kids can and will work, when given any task, and I love seeing the change from it being hard work on their writing or their science lab to the hard physical work that our clean up entails. 

Earth Day and environmental awareness moves well beyond the idea of just taking care of your own place, though. Earth is a home to us all and we need actions both personal and also scalable to make the changes needed. The Service auxiliary program chose this week to begin their work as trail stewards for a section of trail in the Marsh River Preserve in Newcastle. Students cut back overgrown foliage, cleared sticks and small branches from the trail, and made a report of any larger items that might need attention to Midcoast Conservancy. There is also an interpretive trail that they checked out to see what future possibilities there might be for engagement for kids and families. Thank you to Eugenia and Abi for organizing opportunities for our students to get into the community, put their values into action, and make a difference. 

Earth Day began in 1970 as a day for demonstrations to raise awareness of environmental issues and is credited with spurring the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency by the end of that year. Within twenty years, it had grown into an international event. This year, it is estimated that over one billion people participated in a clean-up, parade, or other acknowledgement of Earth Day. This year’s focus is on the impact of plastics. Earthday.org has called for a 60% reduction in worldwide plastics production in the next fifteen years. Microplastics in the ocean are of particular concern. (NatGeoKids, earthday.org, Wikipedia)

Taking care is a powerful concept to bring to our children. Kids are natural justice warriors and their strength will be needed to plan and execute the next phases of environmental action. In our local coastal communities, we are clearly seeing the impact of strong storms and unusual precipitation patterns. This year, Earth Day fits in well with the CTL science theme of weather systems, being studied by all grades in a developmentally appropriate manner during third trimester. The Maine Won’t Wait climate action website may be an interesting resource for families looking to learn more together.Love, Katy