Teaching environmental stewardship can be fun, students, teachers and volunteers at Wrightsville Beach Elementary School learned on Friday when the school transformed its annual “Fun Day” into lessons that fit with Earth Day.
So how do you teach a young mind about the importance of topics like recycling, litter collection and even maintaining personal fitness? Through games, of course.
Held every year, “Fun Day” is normally a day to help the students get exercise and team up to play games. Today, those games had an environmental theme.
For instance, the giant game of tic-tac-toe race was renamed the “Reduce-Reuse-Recycle” relay, while the tug-of-war was contested as the “Battle of the Recyclables.” And though several of the events were common activities recast to fit the environmental themes, the event’s organizer worked to make sure the kids learned important lessons through playing.
As an example, reduce-reuse-recycle was another theme emphasized in the “Triple R Relay” race. There, the students would start the race by first, turning off a light switch to save energy and then by hanging a shirt on drying line, to represent reducing energy. From there, they collect recyclable materials and run to deposit them in the familiar green boxes.
“The teachers like the message of reduce-reuse-recycle,” said physical education teacher Joelle Newman. “With each activity, we explain how it relates to Earth Day.”
In “Beech Sweep,” the students use a grabber to collect trash on the beach, here represented by the sand volleyball court. The kids scoured the beach to pick up miniature globes of the Earth and other items from the sand, learning lessons they can apply to their own trips to the beach.
Eight-year-old Kyla Burke said the activity would encourage her to help clean up the beach, though she knew what was safe to touch and what wasn’t.
“I will pick up trash unless it’s a cigarette butt,” she said. “Then I would burry it.”
To help keep the event organized, the Wrightsville Beach Elementary Parent-Teacher Association brought out more than 50 volunteers. PTA president Allison McWhorter said that the Fun Day helped teach cooperation and community involvement.
“It’s great that they work together as a team,” McWhorter said. “They aren’t even concerned about competing and winning, for them, it’s more about having fun.”
Newman agreed, adding: “The kids want it to be fair and to do it the right way.”
Students who weren’t playing in the sunshine were learning about environmental issues in the classroom, as Wrightsville Beach Elementary also held its Marine Science Fair on Friday, giving the kids a double-dose of Earth-themed curriculum. Students moved through six different classroom stations where different topics on marine life were covered.
Casey Radley, an educator at the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher, brought a horseshoe crab to the science fair, where she said she found the school’s fifth graders quite knowledgeable about the animal.
“You guys could teach this class,” she exclaimed after the students correctly answered several questions about the marine arthropods.
When asked why the horseshoe crab is a “hero” to people, Thoman Burgee knew it was for the creature’s blue blood, which is used to test human vaccines.
Radley asked how they could help protect the horseshoe crab, Nellie Harris said that the areas where the horseshoe crabs lay eggs could be protected, earning praise for her correct answer.
Some students asked how horseshoe crabs were able to survive the extinction event that killed the dinosaurs, with Radley explaining that their underwater environment likely helped the creatures survive.
“They want to know about what they eat and how they can be projected,” Radley said regarding the questions most often asked by students about the horseshoe crab.
