Upgrade for Older Kids
If you teach older kids and want to get them inspired to help protect the Earth, there are many ways you can go. You can simply teach them some background information about environmental issues and encourage them to develop their own projects for further learning. If you're not ready to hand off that much control, here are some ideas to get started.
Get a Grip on Government
Learning how to create positive change in your community through hands-on experience is an invaluable lesson for life. Your students will never forget their experience, and perhaps it will inspire them to become engaged in community service.
Have your students decide on an Earth-saving project they want to take on — energy conservation at city hall, pesticide-free park management through the parks and recreation department, wildflower and native habitat plantings throughout the community, or a recycling curbside pickup for your community. Pick one and go for it. Here's a general outline of how to get started:
Describe your project and list the outcomes you want from it. Define the problem and potential solutions. What will it cost? Are there any similar programs in the area that you can model? What benefits are the communities seeing?
Begin with a letter-writing campaign to the mayor and council members. Be sure to research the topic thoroughly before you begin writing.
Make phone calls to set up appointments to visit with the mayor and other members of the administrative offices that most often handle the topic you want to discuss. Invite them to the city council meeting when you present your proposal.
Prepare for your appointments by writing a proposal. Be sure to include what you want, why it is important, when you want it to happen, and how you will help support the outcome.
Work with one of the elected officials or staff members to formally write out your proposal to give to your city council.
Contact major local media to set up interviews with your students to talk about your proposal.
Go as a large group to a city council meeting and have a representative or two speak to the city council to support the proposal.
Whichever governing body you decide to deal with, try to find champions from within the system to help move your effort forward. Always keep an open mind to opposing arguments and try to work with critics to find mutually beneficial solutions.
You don't have to be an expert on the environment to start teaching it to your kids. Keep it simple and let your students do the research. Let them know you're learning, too. Just take it one step at a time. Before you know it, other teachers will be referring to you as the school expert. In the meantime, refer to the real experts whenever you'd like to get more details about an issue. Call local environmental organizations, the department of natural resources, or a local college or university. Ask if someone could come and talk to your class. You can also put up a wish list of topics for volunteer speakers and ask parents to look it over. One of them may be a professional expert willing to come and talk to your class, or maybe one is simply passionate about an issue and would relish the opportunity to spread some inspiration.
Service learning is a method of teaching and learning experience through community service. Get your students involved in their communities and make it clear to them that their involvement is the fundamental basis of democracy. Visit http://servicelearning.org or check out the nonprofit environmental organizations in your community.
Teens Teaching Tots
Lower-level teachers always need additional help, and giving older students the opportunity to teach younger ones is empowering and beneficial to both age groups. Work with an elementary school teacher to design a project for your junior high and high school students. It could be putting on a play about a topic they are learning about in class. It could be creating curriculum addressing an environmental issue they are learning about. Get creative and let the students get creative, too! Decide what days and what hours you will send your students to help with the project. Require a written report from your students after it is completed. It should describe the project, why it was important, what they did, what the outcome was, and how they felt about it. Perhaps providing a project survey would be helpful to them. Always ask them to explain the positive outcome of the project.
Growing Up, Getting Deeper, and Growing Stronger
Every project in this book can be researched in a more thorough manner for upper grade levels. Empowering teens is all about providing them with knowledge and actions they can really care about. It's about making them proud of what they do. It's also about having fun, so be sure to add that to your projects. Here are a few suggestions for helping your students grow into enthusiastic community leaders.
Add music and food to the project.
Provide students with a list of media contacts in the community and encourage them to write press releases about their projects.
Invite speakers to your school. Mayors, council members, and state representatives are all good role models who are involved in community action. Ask them to tell the students how they became civic leaders. Have students do some research and prepare questions in advance.
When you finish a project, put together a book about it. Have each student write a page. Make it a permanent part of the school media center.
A video about the project can also make it a permanent learning experience for future students.
Get online and have students play with designing websites, wikis, blogs, or any other type of virtual engagement you feel is appropriate. New technologies are making new forms of civic engagement possible every day.
The great thing about working with older students is that (usually) they don't need so much structure and supervision. You have much more flexibility in what types of projects to do, and, generally, if you give students freedom, they will fly.
