Trash in the Neighborhood

Most of you know that we have a representation of our neighborhood in the classroom.  On the day before our "snow vacation"  I had stapled candy wrappers, kleenex, bandaids, newspaper and even crumpled sticky notes all over it.   I wondered how long it would take the kids to notice the "trash" that was now covering our replica of Queen Anne.  I think it took about 5 minutes before someone said " Ms. Meck,  why is their stuff everywhere?  It looks horrible."   There wasn't much time for discussion because we were dismissed two hours early and didn't come back to school until this morning.  This weekend I got an email from a parent who told me that his daughter was so worried about our "garbage problem" that she had created a recycling truck so that we could start to clean up our project.   This afternoon the kids and I finally got the chance to talk about littering.  First we talked about our feelings - sad and mad were at the top of the list.  Then we talked about how we notice litter everywhere and sometimes we are often guilty of dropping something and thinking "that's ok" someone else will pick it up or "no worries, it was just a tiny piece of trash.   We then started talking about how we notice litter everywhere, in our classroom, in our school, in our neighborhood, in our world and we don't always stop to do anything about it.   I'm not kidding when I say that some of my 6 years olds were talking with real concern about their planet.  We did some role plaiying and the kids came up with some rules for our neighborhood.  No Littering, No Smoking, and " Don't be Lazy - Pick it up, were our top three.  It was time for Math but the kids were still talking about their enviornment and  I just so happenned to have a few trash bags in my purse.  So,  we decided to walk the block around our school and see if we could make a diffference- picking up litter - and we did.  The kids didn't pick up tons or even pounds of garbage but they did work together to make their neighborhood a better place.   I'm really proud of them.