Educator's Toolkit: Healthy Children, Healthy Planet

Activities, lessons and investigations to accompany The Green Guide, Issue 92 (September/October 2002)

Let The Green Guide inform your teaching and educate your students about their world and their health! The September/October 2002 back-to-school issue (Newsletter #92 plus special content at The Green Guide's website, www.thegreenguide.com) can play a central role in many exciting activities, lessons, and investigations. The issue's feature story describes the "Honorable Schoolbag" and other back-to-school product choices that benefit people and the planet. This fall, find out how "honorable" your school is, through investigating the school's environment and its environmental impacts.

School Toxin Audit
(Science, Chemistry)
In "Play Not Spray," learn about pesticides in schools, and one state's alternative to massive and frequent insecticide-spraying. In "Learning in Safety," students can learn about common threats to well-being and learning commonly found in schools: mold, volatile organic compounds (VOC's), arsenic, lead, and others. What goes on at your school? Students can investigate the pesticides used as pest control at their school, using the Pesticide Action Network's database, www.pesticideinfo.org, which provides health information on both products and the chemicals they contain. Sample soil under any pressure-treated wood decks and play equipment for arsenic, with nothing more than a spoon, a glass jar, and a local laboratory. Dale Seymour Publications also publishes a middle/high school curriculum entitled Chemicals: Choosing Wisely, part of their Environmental Action series, which provides many lessons on investigating the chemicals used in a school building. The Children's Health Environment Coalition offers a database of chemicals, including some common threats to indoor air-quality like formaldehyde and toluene, which can inform student research.

Air Pollution and Particulates
(Science, Health, Social Studies)
After reading "Sick At Work?", "What's Happening in Children's Health," and "Learning in Safety," students might be curious about what's in the air they breathe. See the wonderful air pollution and health curriculum, Clean Air Express, developed by the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency, with material for all grade levels. It's easy, for example, to investigate particulates, using index cards, cans, tape, petroleum jelly, and other easy-to-find items; the particulates investigation is found in the Air Aware unit of the Clean Air Express curriculum. All Clean Air Express modules are free downloads from www.pscleanair.org/news/cleanairexpress.shtml

Life-Cycle Analysis
(Science, Social Studies, Economics, Health)
In "The Honorable Schoolbag," "Dumping Computers Doesn't Compute!", and "Leave the Virgins Alone!", we learn about the harmful consequences that result from common school-related purchases and materials. Let this information be the starting point for rich life-cycle analysis investigations, in which students research the production, use, and disposal aspects of a product, and uncover and assess social and environmental impacts.

Resources:

• The Green Guide offers product reports and articles that illuminate the health, environmental, and social aspects of many commonly-purchased products. These resources can inform student investigations and reports, and list further references and resources that can further inform students.
• Northwest Environment Watch publishes two books useful to middle and high school teachers. Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things provides life-cycle analyses of sneakers, newspapers, computers, and other common items. A free curriculumguide to Stuff is available at the NEW website. Seven Wonders: Everyday Things for a Healthier Planet looks at some common products with beneficial social and environmental impacts--a bicycle, clothesline, library--but it should be noted that condoms show up in this list (the items are covered in separate chapters, so teachers can distribute and discuss other chapters and skip the section on condoms). NEW has proved extremely generous to educators in the past, and may even be able to provide teachers with copies of their materials free of charge. Contact them at 206/447-1880, new@northwestwatch.org for more information. This material is appropriate for middle and high school students.
• The National Science Teachers Association publishes The Life Cycle of Everyday Stuff, aimed at middle school but also useful in high school, which explores the life cycles of common school and household items.
• The Sustainability Education Center publishes The Paper Trail: Connecting Economic and Social Systems, which introduces the perspective of ecological economics through a life-cycle analysis and school investigation of paper. Students learn how modern markets fail to value the full worth, and fail to assess the true costs, of many products that we buy. Visit The Sustainability Education Center's website for an order form and for a free download of the first week of this 4-week unit, which is aimed at high school students.

Want to Explore Further?

Tools exist to give students a broader understanding of the broader contexts and impacts of their schools, communities and households:

• Roger Tory Peterson Institute offers Teaming With Nature, training for 4th through 8th grade teachers that focuses on using the habitat and heritage of the square kilometer that surrounds your school: www.rtpi.org/eduprogs/selborne.htm. An article about this program, based on ideas and approaches originally developed in the Selbourne Project, is available at www.ruraledu.org/rtpitxt2.html
• The Environmental Action series, published by Dale Seymour Publications, offers curricula on Energy Conservation, Water Conservation, and Waste Reduction. All the titles in the series focus on investigating school processes and gathering school data, and can be used with middle and high school students.
• The New Jersey Sustainable Schools Network has developed tools for measuring your school's greenhouse gas emissions: www.globallearningnj.org/OurShr.htm, and also offer a host of information and resources for making your school more sustainable: www.globallearningnj.org/SSNprograms.htm
• The Green Schools Project , www.ase.org/greenschools/about.htm, will help your students do an energy audit of your school, and then take steps to reduce energy use. School districts are urged to pass on energy savings to the schools. The Green Schools Project is prepared to work with a variety of subjects and grade levels; school savings have ranged from $2500 per school to more than $10,000 per school.
• Airhead (www.airhead.org) provides a tool that allows students to calculate the toxic air emissions that their household generates.
• The New Environmentalist, www.newenvironmentalist.com, offers calculators that demonstrate cost savings and greenhouse gas changes related to planting trees and using air conditioning, transportation, and compact fluorescent light bulbs.
• An ecological footprint is a measurement of the space used in meeting the needs of a community (a household, a school, a town, a country, etc.): its resources, living space, and wastes. Ecological footprints provide an excellent opportunity to learn about environmental impacts, biodiversity, measuring and quantifying human impacts on the planet, global inequality, ecosystems and carrying capacity, and much more. It's also easy to reduce your community's ecological footprint, which affords students opportunities for positive action and civic engagement.
  • The Earth Day Network, www.earthday.net, provides an excellent summary site on ecological footprints, with a calculator to measure household footprints for the US and other countries around the world, and a table comparing the footprints of nations.
  • School kits and comprehensive curricula aimed at middle-school students has been developed by Ecovoyageurs, and are downloadable for free from their website, www.ecovoyageurs.com

Citizen Involvement and Action
(Civics, Social Studies, Science, Service Learning)

What To Do About Diesel: As mentioned in "What's Happening in Children's Health," Diesel School Buses generate major health and environmental problems. Learn about biodiesel, a plant-based alternative to petroleum diesel, which can be purchased by your school district and can fuel your school buses. Also visit the Union of Concerned Scientists' Clean School Bus Campaign, www.cleanschoolbus.org.

Inspired by the citizen activism and concern for children's health that Cheryl Walsh demonstrated in "Learning in Safety?" Students and teachers can consult this excellent list of guides and resources for youth citizen involvement and action, maintained by the Center for Environmental Education: www.cee-ane.org/topics/activism.html

Students can pursue the many suggestions and opportunities for citizen action presented in The Green Guide. The Fall 2002 Green Guide presents many opportunities to take action for a healthier school and planet:

• Start a campaign to deal with your school and community's electronic waste. Students can not only donate, recycle, or safely dispose of the school's computers, they can also sponsor a Take It Back! Night at the school, where families can drop off their old or broken electronics, learn about the dangers of e-waste and the opportunities available for donation and repair, and take action to get electronics out of the waste stream. Use The Green Guide's Dumping Computers Doesn't Compute! as a reference.
• Refer to Save the Virgins!, our Paper InterActivate!, and The Green Guide's Paper Product Report to persuade your school to use earth-friendly paper and to reduce the amount of paper your school and community uses. Students can brainstorm ways of reducing paper use at school: handing in papers via email or disk, learning to edit with word-processor editing tools instead of printing out draft after draft of a paper -- the list is endless!
• Reduce polystyrene and plastics at your school and in your community. Read our Go Ask Allison for information and tips; Green Guide Newsletter #88-89, available at the archives on The Green Guide website, is an excellent resource on Plastics and alternatives to plastics.

Learn how to green your school building! Smart Design Forum 3 (October 3-4, Washington DC) will bring together the world's foremost green building design practitioners, and there will be special sessions on the design of educational facilities. Visit www.swampnet.org/sdf/ for more information and registration.

Questions? Comments? We at The Green Guide strive to make our publication useful to educators, and we seek to provide educators with the best and most relevant resources available. Contact us at education@thegreenguide.com if you have ideas or suggestions for The Educator's Toolkit.