Go Green

Kids Care Club. The Kids Care Club is an environmental education themed club consisting of a group of children from WASC who have a desire to educate themselves with today's environmental matters. A wildly popular interactive learning game is (BBC) Planet Earth. They use their knowledge of how to reduce, reuse, recycle and care about others in a positive manner to do a small part in making life on planet earth a better one for all living plants, animals and people. The children conceive and carry out activities based on the curriculum learned in an effort to help spread the message that we should all care about the planet. Some of the assignments range from creating milk jug bird feeders; assembling an Earth Day collage or mural from items which would otherwise be discarded in the trash; organizing a Williams Elementary School Clean Up project; and producing a Help the Animals fair.

Children's Books. Long before saving the earth became a global concern, Dr. Seuss, speaking through his character the Lorax, warned against mindless progress and the danger it posed to the earth's natural beauty. The Lorax appears and speaks for the trees, since they have no voice of their own. "Unless someone like you...cares a whole awful lot...nothing is going to get better...It's not." The big, colorful pictures and the fun images, word plays and rhymes make this an amusing exposition of the ecology crisis. Lessons from the book are discussed and used for thematic projects.

Children's Movies. In the distant future, a small waste collecting robot inadvertently embarks on a space journey that will ultimately decide the fate of mankind. Seven hundred years after mass consumerism, earth is shown to be an abandoned planet covered in trash. Giving up on restoring earth's ecosystem, the human population is evacuated into space, leaving behind an army of trash compactor robots called "WALL-E" to clean up. Soon after, however, the planet was deemed too toxic to sustain life, forcing humanity to remain in space. This is the story of how WALL-E and EVE, an advanced robot sent from the humans with the directive of searching for signs of life on earth, happily reunite and join the human and robot passengers in restoring the earth's environment. Lessons from the movie are discussed and used for thematic projects.

Clean Green. It is a fact that traces of chemical ingredients in common commercial home cleaning kits are found in our water sources. These chemicals may contaminate the streams, rivers and lakes from which the water in our local water treatment plants may be sourced. Contaminated food and contaminated water equate to disease. By using homemade and non-toxic cleaning solutions, you get the personal gratification of protecting the planet as well as your health by reducing the world's consumption of chemical cleaning agents. Using simple ingredients like water, baking soda, white vinegar, and tea tree oil can keep your home stain-free, dust-free, mold-free, and sparkly clean. We discover many ideas for natural ways to remove dirt, odor and grime in and outside the house and make our own Earth Friendly Clean Up kit to help bring about an environmentally friendly spring cleaning.

Rainforest Café. At least 80% of the developed world's food originated in the tropical rainforest. Its bountiful gifts to the world include fruits like avocados, coconuts, figs, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, bananas, guavas, pineapples, mangos and tomatoes; vegetables including corn, potatoes, rice, winter squash and yams; spices like black pepper, cayenne, chocolate, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, sugar cane, turmeric, coffee and vanilla, and nuts including cashews. At least 3,000 fruits are found in the rainforests; of these, only 200 are now in use in the Western World. Rainforest plants are rich in secondary metabolites, particularly alkaloids. Biochemists believe alkaloids protect plants from disease and insect attacks. Many alkaloids from higher plants have proven to be of medicinal value and benefit. We explore some of these foods in this tasty lesson and learn the essential benefits they provide for life on earth. We wrap up this lesson with a fan favorite flavorsome earthly delight – Sand & Dirt Cup or Terrarium – yummy!

Shoe Collection Drive. Did you know that it takes about one thousand years for sneakers to biodegrade? Last year alone, Americans discarded more than 300 million pairs of shoes. When these shoes break down in our landfills, the toxic glue that holds the shoes together can leak into our water supply and atmosphere. Help save the earth by recycling your footwear. We offer a simple way to help reduce the strain on our environment with our Shoe Collection Drive. The children of WASC clean out their closets and donate their outgrown "gently worn" footwear. At the end of the drive, we will drop off our inventory to a local Soles4Souls collection center for refurbishing and eventual worldwide distribution to people in need instead of throwing them away.