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April 2006
Going green
Children learn to be good stewards of the earth
Margaret Plevak
Special to Parenting
Fourth grader Grace Kubiak, left, and fifth grader Megan Hintz, students at St. Thomas Aquinas School in Waterford, show off the painted trash bins they helped design at the school. (Catholic Herald photo by Sam Lucero)
Every spring, students in Nancy Willing’s science classes at St. John Nepomuk Elementary School in Racine make North Beach their classroom while studying ecology. The beach, on the city’s northeast side, is sandwiched between the Racine Park Zoo and the Racine Yacht Club in a scenic slice of Lake Michigan shoreline, but the lessons can be messy, dirty, and sometimes downright daunting.

Students pick up litter along the beach, and the amount of fast food wrappers, soda cans and beer bottles adds up quickly. One year, Willing recalled, the group collected enough garbage to create a small mountain of trash bags.

“We (clean up the beach) periodically, so that helps, but it was just an incredible amount of garbage we picked up that year,” she said.

“When you see all that, you realize it’s just stuff people throw away and it can end up in the lake. It’s just disgusting, really.”

Willing coordinates her class trips to North Beach with a local environmental organization, the Racine Earth Service Corps Youth United, which also works with her students on other activities during the year, such as a science fair with an ecological bent, featuring student projects that examine the impact of air pollution or research the effectiveness of earth-friendly cleaning products.

Full story...
April 2006
Catholic Herald Parenting is a supplement of the Catholic Herald published eight times annually, September to May. It is intended to help parents pass on the Catholic faith to their children.
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