Friday, April 18, 2014

Earthships, Clubhouses and Girl Scout Greenhouses

http://ecologywithlilg.weebly.com/green-building.html
1st grade architectural drawing of the perfect clubhouse!
A wonderful week of sustainability.  Ms. Burgett's were the 1st of five classes exploring energy conservation.  Since buildings are the major source of global demand for energy and materials that produce by-product greenhouse gases building green is an important concept that must be understood if we are to ameliorate rising carbon levels in the atmosphere.

The students used their developing presentation skills to show off their architectural drawings of the perfect energy-efficient (see checklist in the picture) clubhouse. 
They have been thinking seriously about using energy and the impact it has on the environment.  They have conscientiously been picking up trash, recycling not only to keep waste materials out of the environment, but also because using raw materials to make new things uses so much more energy.  Even though the mathematics of percents are not 1st grade concepts they can understand that recycling aluminum saves 95% of the energy that making a can from scratch requires.    

Next week they will meet a real architect who works to design and build Leed certified buildings.  I took the student's drawings and the book they read to him yesterday so that he would know what they have been thinking.  Cory Dugan works for TLC Engineering, a firm that designs buildings for corporate and governmental organizations that meet LEED standards.  They also adopted the Architecture 2030 challenge which intends to create carbon neutral buildings by 2030.  As I write I am looking out at the framework for the Girl Scount Greenhouse going up.  We will have the greenhouse set up next weekend! Cheers to sustainability!

The kids were fascinated to see people building earthships. These buildings are completely self-contained.  They take no water, electricity or gas from the grid, and they produce no waste. I was equally stunned by the use of so many materials that we regularly discard to make lovely homes that are totally carbon neutral and healthy!  As I think about the impact we have in schools I think that this quote by Neil  Gaiman says it best.  “Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.”  M is for Magic   I would just change one thing about Neil's quote.  It isn't only the stories we read or hear that never quite leave us---it is the story we see being lived in those around us that awakens us to our own potential! 

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