It's Earth Day!!!

Here is a great poem from the lovely Amanda Gorman to celebrate Earth Day!

I love being at Spring Harbor because of its focus on environmental studies and embedding environmental issues into all areas of our curriculum.  We all should be concerned about the health of our planet and work to keep her healthy so she can provide us a place to live!

As we celebrate Earth Day today, I wanted to share a few events and resources you might want to check out.  

There is a virtual Earth Day scavenger hunt you can participate in.  More info is here and there is a free option and a paid option. 

Earth Day Live is another big event happening.  You can check out that live event here, it starts at 11am our time, but will also be available to view after it is over too. 

Through the link above you can also check out other events that happened in the days leading up to Earth Day including the Global Youth Summit.

Be active and do something to help support our Earth and it's health.  You can find lots of actions, small and large, that you can do to help the Earth here. 

If you like listening to podcasts, here is a list of some environmentally focused ones to check out.

I hope you all have a great Earth Day!

Earth Day

Earth Day is actually my birthday (happy birthday to me!) so I've always thought it was a special day! My previous school district always had a huge Earth Day celebration filled with special learning sessions in the morning by guest speakers from the community and then an afternoon of service learning where, as a school community, we would do some type of service activity like cleaning litter off the roads, or planting trees and doing some landscaping around the school building. It was one of the things I so loved about my last school.  So coming to work at Spring Harbor - an environmentally focused middle school - seemed like a great fit for me.  I'm sad that we can't all be together today to some environmental activities around Spring Harbor and its gardens, but you can always do something to help the Earth or learn more about it!

Today is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day! (BTW - I'm not 50 yet!)

Some fun Earth Day activities: Today go to Google.com (or click here and maybe it still works) to learn about bees and play one of the Google Doodle games.

PBS Wisconsin has some great videos and information on Gaylord Nelson - the father of Earth Day and someone I did not know about Milly Zantow who is like, the mother of the recycling movement.  These are very short, yet interesting videos and also provide links to more information if you want it!

Travel and Leisure has 9 activities you can do from home to celebrate Earth Day.

And, I know this "Safer at Home" and not being able to go out and do things like "normal" is hard... but it has had a positive effect on our planet... I'm not saying we should all be stuck at home all of the time, but it's a good time to reflect on what we are doing to our planet and environment when we are living "normal" lives.  Maybe we need to create a new normal to help save our planet.