So I have had a realization in my professional and personal life that I would like to share: I can only help by controlling things that I can control.
After realizing this, I decided to put my two passions, teaching and saving the environment, to the test this year by modeling what I can do and teach my students in the classroom. I know they love pictures and videos, and I know they learn and remember things through songs. So why can’t I incorporate good, environmentally conscious habits, into songs? My students need to learn a lot about their environment – pictures, sorting, letter and word identification, along with independently doing things like opening a milk carton, or cleaning up.
I can use that to my advantage and make their learning real and hands on by incorporating it into their routine, using video and picture support.
In doing so, I plan to work with my speech and occupational therapists at school, as well as other colleagues, to help create a school-wide program to help our whole school do this (see the GoFundMe Project here). However, I can’t teach them unless I do myself.
This is the first of many posts on how this is going to help the earth, as well as the research my colleagues and I are doing regarding video modeling in our classrooms.
What I will be working on is teaching my students how to open and recycle a milk carton. See the video here. I used one of their favorite songs, and incorporated videos of my students (their peers) and myself (their teacher) into a video on what they can do, and what I want them to learn.
Once they have mastered that, I will add more visuals of items in the classroom, and students will watch this video on recycling many different products, and we will expand our learning from there.
If you are interested in learning more about Terracycle, please message me or check out their website to see if you can recycle yourself!
Stay tuned!
