Our New Year Resolutions for the Earth! Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Replace!

As our current Unit of Inquiry is Conservation, we decided to make some resolutions to be more Earth friendly. We have been learning about the 3 R's, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle and we've been discussing as to wether or not the 3 R's are enough. As a class we brainstormed other ways to help the Earth and to live a more sustainable lifestyle. We looked through some books and checked out some websites about conservation and we came up with a few extra R's to add to the list. Our favourites are Refuse and Replace. We decided that Refuse should be the first R to live by. We made a list of things we can Refuse because we now have better and cleaner options. Styrofoam was the number one choice of what we can Refuse, I can't believe as a society that we still accept that stuff!! REFUSE STYROFOAM! We also talked about what actions we should be Refusing to accept, such as littering. Some of my little monkeys suggested that we should be Refusing to hurt animals. A few of them made New Year Resolutions to Refuse to squish bugs, this just melted my little eco-heart. Have you read "Hey Little Ant" by Phillip M. Hoose??? It's a cute little book that shows the perspective of an ant, it's a great read to spark a conversation about empathy and/or perspective.

Our second R, Replace, came from several of the books we were reading. Many books about conservation recommend planting trees and flowers to Replace the ones that we use in our daily lives. We all really liked this idea and talked about other natural resources that we can help by Replacing them, such as collecting rain water. We also figured out that we can help the Earth by Replacing older energy consuming products with cleaner energy saving options such as CFL lightbulbs. 


REFUSE, REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE & REPLACE FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE!

Unit of Inquiry - Conservation

Unit of Inquiry - Conservation

Unit of Inquiry - Conservation

Unit of Inquiry - Conservation