To compost or not to compost
“Earth Day, Earth Day, what can we do on Earth Day?
What can we do on Earth Day?
We can save our Earth”
This is the chorus of our Earth Day song composed by John which we started singing today, as we started our Earth Day week; the week when we truly focus on what we can all do, individually and as a community, to take care of the earth, that we live on. We know that we all live in Japan and we also know that Japan is on the earth. If we want to have a beautiful earth to grow up on, we all need to contribute to making it this way. When our teachers were talking to us, we were wondering; what can we do, to take care of our earth? We told our teachers many, different ways, that we can take care of the earth. Shelley wrote down so many things from our conversations and we will send them to everyone at the end of the week.
We don’t know where to begin to tell you all the things that we did today because there were so many weird and wonderful things we observed, did, sang etc. Our day started with us helping our teachers move the furniture because on Miyashita Monday, we need to make space in our room, for our gymnastics class. When it was empty, we sat together and spoke about the sound “m” and we tried to guess whose name starts with “m”. We thought of Mirai, Meg, Maddy and Miles. Then Shelley asked us if we could think of one of the teachers whose names also start with the letter “m”. We went all the way from Buds Class to the office and eventually found Maryna. She was one of the teachers who celebrated her birthday with us today. The other three teachers were Nimo, Darren and Sayaka. We went downstairs to Buds Class to celebrate together later in the day and had a lovely time singing. We said that they didn’t have crowns to make them look like birthday people and they also needed a cake, candles, a card and a present. So, there were five things that they needed to complete their birthday party. Some of our friends found crowns and put them on their heads; then two friends found two cakes and carried them carefully to the table. There were candles in the cakes, with one cake for each teacher. We sang “If you’re happy and you know it”, and “How old are you now?” We clapped and counted and told the teachers to tell us to stop when we arrived at the number corresponding to their age. Sayaka was the first one and she said that she is 21. Maryna was the second one and she said that she was 25 and then Darren and Nimo both said that they were 29.
To be honest, we think that Nimo was the only who told us his correct age. The other three teachers were just teasing us! We presented them with their cards and presents and we turned off the lights when they blew their candles out. Each teacher had one tall candle to blow out. It was a lovely celebration with everyone in the school and we wish them a great birthday year.
During the morning, we looked at food waste and plastic waste. We learnt that food waste can go back into the soil and it makes the soil rich with nutrients. Plants love food that is rich in nutrients as it helps them grow and gives them the best food to “eat”. We put banana skin, tissue, plants from the tadpoles and a used tea bag into the composting soil. We also added the dead tadpoles as well and had the opportunity to look at them when they were dead. They were not moving and we felt a little sad that they were not going to grow up into frogs. We said goodbye to them when we put them into soil.
We subsequently looked at our plants on the balcony and we saw that two of them have already sprouted. The radishes and edamame are growing really, well. We are waiting patiently for the spinach, onion, lettuce and carrots to grow. We watered them and observed how they had grown even more, since earlier in the day.
Part of our Earth Day project is to work out how we can take care of the earth, how we can create more gardens and plant seeds to make our own vegetables, and of course how we can dispose of garbage in an environmentally sustainable way. We realised that at home we also put garbage in recycling bins and try to sort things in the correct containers. We are trying to create zero waste at school this week and will try at home as well. We are learning how to differentiate between food scraps that we can put in our composting and plastic, that is not environmentally friendly and is not good for our earth. In fact, we heard our teachers talking about beautiful sea creatures like dolphins, whales and turtles that swallow plastic bags that go into the ocean and get very sick. There is so much that we can do to take care of the earth. For this week of zero waste we will be composting food scraps and we hope to continue doing this in the future. It is up to each and every one of us to play our part in taking care of the earth…..and we can do it.
We spoke a lot about the tadpoles that died over the weekend and wondered why did they die. We told Shelley that we thought maybe she didn’t feed them enough, change the water to keep it clean or maybe the rocks crushed them. We feel happy that four are still swimming in the tank and we hope that they will still be swimming tomorrow. We had a long conversation which we documented and will add o it during the week and then share it with our family’s.
Thanks for a fabulous day.
Love, all the children in Petals Class.