We had so much to talk about at our meeting this week! First off, Mr. Audia and I announced that our Early Act group has been invited to come present to the Board of Education! How cool is that?! We will be at the next Board of Education meeting along with a few of our Early Act kids. Please come and see us. The meeting is Monday, March 9 at 7:00 at Central Office. We will be showing the video at the right. This video shows all of the loans we have made to Kiva. It's pretty powerful to watch and look into the faces of the people whose lives these kids have impacted. | The video above shows every loan Early Act has made on Kiva. That's 173 loans squeezed into two minutes. Woah. |
Our next order of business was discussion about our school's Earth Day Recycle Challenge. Mrs. Kapolka organizes this challenge every year. This year we have been challenged to do our part in reducing the amount of plastic water bottles being thrown in the trash. Students have been asked to bring in plastic bottles with the number 1 recycle symbol (clean with tops removed) for our recycle boxes. Cherry Creek is shooting to collect 7 bottles per student. Students can also take pictures of themselves using a reusable bottle and send it in to [email protected]. (Make you include the name of the school, name of photographer, number of students in the photo & whether they can use it for promotion of their programs.) Each picture will earn 45 bottles toward our totals. Reusable bottles eliminate the need for disposable bottles keeping them out of landfills!
We talked about what our Early Act group can do to help boost our totals. This week we talked about WHY it's important to rid the earth of all this plastic! Even though we feel like we recycle an awful lot of plastic, the truth is, about 70% of all plastic is new production plastic. That means that only about 30% of the world's plastic being made is recycled. :( NOT GOOD ENOUGH. The United States alone will create 115 BILLION pounds of plastic JUST THIS YEAR. This stuff doesn't just go away. It doesn't break down in the landfills. It ends up everywhere we don't want it--in our lakes, in our oceans, on the sides of the road. Ew. Cherry Creek is going to do something about it.
Websites for more info:
Recycle Kent's website
Info about plastic water bottles
Plastic in the Great Lakes
Earth Institute of Columbia University Blog
EPA Website on Plastic
We talked about what our Early Act group can do to help boost our totals. This week we talked about WHY it's important to rid the earth of all this plastic! Even though we feel like we recycle an awful lot of plastic, the truth is, about 70% of all plastic is new production plastic. That means that only about 30% of the world's plastic being made is recycled. :( NOT GOOD ENOUGH. The United States alone will create 115 BILLION pounds of plastic JUST THIS YEAR. This stuff doesn't just go away. It doesn't break down in the landfills. It ends up everywhere we don't want it--in our lakes, in our oceans, on the sides of the road. Ew. Cherry Creek is going to do something about it.
Websites for more info:
Recycle Kent's website
Info about plastic water bottles
Plastic in the Great Lakes
Earth Institute of Columbia University Blog
EPA Website on Plastic
The last thing we talked about is incredibly exciting! Our school is going to be partnering with a school in Kenya to have pen pals! Kenya is one of our top countries on Kiva--it is tied with Guatemala for the most loans from Cherry Creek. Kids at Cherry Creek will be writing letters to students in Kenya three times a year to help them learn to read and write in English. This is going to be an exciting adventure!