Spring has sprung in the Lower School! With a cross-curricular theme week centered on sustainability, our youngest learners’ worldview expanded. They took a deep dive into our home planet and what we, as humans, can do to keep Earth and its animal, plant, and human inhabitants healthy and thriving.
The week kicked off at a Beasley assembly where Lower School Science Teacher Laura Pupillo introduced the theme and all the ways students would be engaging with sustainability activities, including participating in a “compost lunch.” Below are some activities students enjoyed during this well-timed theme week before spring break.
Literacy & Homeroom Activities
Lower School Literacy Coordinator Liz Crowder shared The Earth Book by Todd Parr in homeroom classrooms with students. The book uses a whimsical and heartfelt approach to explore environmental protection and conservation, teaching children simple, actionable ways to care for the planet. From planting trees and using both sides of paper to saving energy and reusing materials, it offers tips on how kids can “go green” every day.
In conjunction with the read-alouds, Junior Kindergarten students decorated reusable canvas totes to be used as grocery bags, Senior Kindergarten students not only did some bird watching, they also picked up trash on campus, first graders focused on reusing paper in their classrooms, second grade learned about Earth’s water cycle and created bracelets representing the water cycle, third grade dove into a renewable energy lesson where they documented, categorized, and discussed energy usage for 24 hours and how they can conserve energy, and fourth graders launched a sustainability scavenger hunt solving math riddles to learn about the decomposition rates of everyday items. Did you know that fishing line and plastic water bottles take nearly 600 years to decompose, banana peels take 3-4 weeks, and fallen leaves only take a year? Spoiler alert: Electronic waste like laptops and iPads never decompose.
Science
In science, all Lower School students engaged in projects linking pollinators and food.
JK, SK, and first- and fourth-grade students grew greens and radishes in the science courtyard garden beds and on an indoor grow tower for the Lower School dining hall salad bar. JK and SK students also learned about recycling and trash, and SK students used Ozobot robots to sort items into different waste groups. Director of Instructional Technology & Digital Literacy Elegan Kramer shared: “The SK students did a fantastic job using the Ozobots to sort materials into compost, recyclables, and trash. I was particularly impressed with their ability to navigate the Ozobots, especially as the Ozobots’ perspective shifted with each turn. Great work, SK-ers!”
What better way to kick off Sustainability Week than with a trip to the St. Louis Science Center? First graders jumped in feet first with a visit to the Planetarium and watched the movie The Little Star that Could, a story of the sun and solar system which ties into their unit on the history of Earth. The students also explored exhibits ranging from chickens, compost, and combine tractors to dinosaurs and fossils. Lower School First Grade Teacher Jenn Gillis shared, “Anything that helps us celebrate and understand our Earth is one step closer to learning how to protect it through sustainability efforts!”
Second graders collected native seeds from our campus gardens to share with our school community, encouraging recipients to plant in outdoor spaces near their homes or campus to improve pollinator habitats. Third graders focused on water quality, measuring our campus creek’s health, removing trash, and clearing the way for native plant restoration through a honeysuckle abatement project.
Fourth graders piloted a compost program in Lower School. They researched composting, created a job calendar, and managed the compost collection, partnering with grounds staff to maintain a healthy balance of browns and greens. After a successful trial period with the third and fourth-grade lunch shift, students created an educational video and hosted a compost-themed lunch for the other shifts. The younger students did such a great job with composting that fourth-grade students will bring composting back to the younger lunch shifts in April and May.
Pupillo said, “These experiences fostered a tangible understanding of environmental interconnectedness and the cyclical nature of ecosystems. It is clear from conversations with students and in the work they have created that they now know what sustainability means and are already practicing actionable steps to protect the Earth.”
Art
During Winter Term, Lower Schoolers had the opportunity to collaborate with Artists First, where artists and students painted canvases together. Throughout the day, as artists were painting, they used paper to lift excess paint off the canvas, thus leaving a lot of scrap paper filled with paint remnants.
Lower School Art Teacher Sarah Garner shared, “Instead of throwing all that paper away, we decided to reuse and repurpose the paper during Sustainability Week. One exciting aspect of this experience was the creative challenge of repurposing the paper materials rather than letting these materials go to waste. We set out to find imaginative ways to transform them into new artworks, breathing new life into the paper through artistic expression.
“By repurposing the paper from our Artists First visit, we not only reduced waste but also gave a deeper meaning to the materials we used. The project underscored the importance of seeing potential in discarded materials and the power of art to transform even the most humble objects into something new and beautiful.”
Spanish
In Spanish class, Lower School Spanish Teacher Soledad Villagomez led students through vocabulary lessons about weather, daytime/nighttime, farms, insects, ocean, river, recycling, energy, sun, and more. They also discussed similarities and differences of animals and habitats unique to South America, including llama, guanaco, alpaca, and vicuña. Students joyfully learned and sang The Earth and its Resources on the Rockalingua platform to develop both listening and writing skills in Spanish.
Library
Sustainability Week in the Lower School library was a fun place to be! There were different activities for older and younger students, but all centered around the same read-aloud book: Small Steps, Big Change by Annemarie Cool.
The picture book inspires children to make small, everyday actions to create positive change in the world, drawing inspiration from the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Lower School Librarian Thomas Buffington said, “We liked this book because it offers concise ‘kid-powered’ tips to make a sustainable impact in our communities. These ‘small steps’ also spawned some great discussions about how to reuse everyday objects such as grocery bags and what we can recycle daily at school. We also discussed the importance of conserving energy and water at home and in the classroom.”
Some of the younger students decorated flowers connected to the story and hung them on a community ‘garden’ bulletin board in the library hallway. Older students engaged in several digital resources about sustainability, including an online quiz via NatGeo, TFK and Storyline Online articles, and a waste-sorting game from the ABCya! platform.
Buffington shared, “The biggest hit was a VR experience through Google Arts and Culture – ‘Rewild the World’ – designed to educate players about the challenges endangered animals face with diminishing environments. Students used their own movements to act like sea turtles cleaning up the ocean and engaging in other fun activities.”
Thank you, Lower School teachers, for planning a thoughtful sustainability-themed week, empowering student leadership, and fostering global citizenship!