Happy Earth Day!

This was a fun-filled, busy week with lots of special classes and activities. In particular, we taught Earth Day lessons with 4th and 6th grade. In 6th grade we started with a mind map, brainstorming what we can do for the Earth, and I was pleasantly surprised by how many ideas they came up with and could express in English. Then we listened to "3 Rs" by Jack Johnson and tried to fill in some of the lyrics. I think it's a really great song because not only does it teach reduce, reuse, recycle, but it also has a lot of repetition and incorporates multiplication!

4B had class on April 22, so I thought it would be fun to supplement their textbook's unit on Earth Day ("We can turn off the lights. We can plant trees. ...") by actually planting a tree. The school gardener kindly let us use a spot behind their classroom, and I brought a fig tree (the most easily transportable by scooter). It was drizzling a little bit and the kids had fun digging in the mud. Recently I also planted a small vegetable garden (eggplants, tomatoes, Thai basil) with Russ and the neighborhood children by our apartments. The kids were so into it that we had to do rock paper scissors to see who got to plant what. The work went quickly with so many hands, and it was so encouraging to see that these kids had had intimate experiences with plants before, because their parents grow vegetables and flowers -- every little bit of land is used here and there are so many roadside gardens. Hopefully they will keep this mentality with them for a long long time.