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From the Hartford Courant

Raising Little Green Thumbs

A Connecticut elementary school focuses on environmental education in its curriculum, teaching even the youngest students how important it is to take care of the Earth. Find out what they're doing and how any school can follow in its footsteps.

By SHAWN BEALS, Hartford Courant Staff Writer

November 4, 2007

MANSFIELD — Every morning, students at Southeast Elementary School pack up recyclable items and take them to school, where they sort them into designated bins. And after lunch, they compost the food waste outside the school.

Now, two interns from the University of Connecticut's five-year integrated bachelor's and master's program in the Neag School of Education are building on the school's history of recycling efforts to include nature and the environment in regular classroom curriculum. The interns are working to earn their master's in elementary education and have been working with teachers at Southeast since the start of the school year.

"Environmental education is a key thing," said Liz Kloeblen, one of the interns. "It's something I want to include into my own classroom. It provides students with a more well-rounded education."

She and Danielle Smith are working with the teachers and Principal Norma Fisher-Doiron at Southeast in "making the environment and the outdoors an interdisciplinary topic," Kloeblen said. They are working with the 245 students from pre-K to fourth grade to use the environment to help teach subjects such as math and poetry. Kloeblen said a class collected leaves outside and wrote poems about them.

Fisher-Doiron said the school became the first "green" elementary school in the state in 1997. It also earned the green flag award for recycling in 2001, and they are hoping to earn the award in other areas as well. She said the students can take what they have been learning since they entered the school and bring it with them wherever they go.

"It's the science, it's the everyday living that we continue to do, and it's our interns that make it possible for us," Fisher-Doiron said.

For America Recycles Day, Nov. 15, Smith and Kloeblen have set up a full day of events. There will be a fashion show with clothes made out of recycled materials, including a tie made out of rubber, a coin purse made out of a tire, a T-shirt made out of plastic bottles and boots made out of milk bottles. There will also be recycling games and a book swap for students to trade their books for new ones.

They have also created a guide book for the nature trails behind the school. One class that was reading a book about owls went to the trail to learn more about owls by collecting the droppings and dissecting them to find out what they eat.

"I've never seen a school that had such an amazing program," Smith said. "It's providing me with an opportunity to make science something they can include into everyday learning."

Kloeblen and Smith work at the school three days a week for a full day while taking classes at UConn.

"Every year [we do] more and more," Fisher-Doiron said. "There are new and better ideas. We'd like to have them all week," she said of the interns.

After America Recycles Day, Smith and Kloeblen will set up a rainforest activity where students can buy shirts to save rainforest land. If students buy 10 T-shirts, they save one acre. There is also a scheduled "TV turnoff week" to encourage students to go outside and use less energy, and they are planning to have speakers and events for Earth Day in the spring.

Kloeblen has also been in contact with officials at Big Y grocery stores to buy their reusable bags and sell them at a reduced price "so [students] can take home that concept of reducing waste."

"I've taken environmental education classes, and all of the education I got at UConn helps ideas to be formed, and we get to try the things we've been learning," Kloeblen said.

The elementary school has had an after school "Green Thumbs Club" for several years, and it has gotten so popular that enrollment had to be limited to just fourth-graders.

Fisher-Doiron said Mansfield Middle School's recycling program was started by former Southeast students who noticed the lack of recycling efforts at their new school.

John Zhou, a 7-year-old second-grader, knows the protocol for recycling.

"I bring down the staff [recycling] buckets and our classroom buckets," he said. "The green one you put food inside. The bluish-gray one you put cans and bottles inside."

Contact Shawn Beals at sbeals@courant.com