On Wednesday, October 21st and Monday, October 26th, the Carlow Campus Lab group of Sustainable Earth met with 4th and 5th graders from The Campus Laboratory School of Carlow University to work with the students on an energy and waste conservation workshop.
Consisting of 4 Sustainable Earth members, Adrienne Orlic, Claire Chiang, Jenna Stanislaw, and Jocelyn Tseng, our group met with the 4th and 5th graders through Zoom. The 4th graders were presented with the energy workshop and the 5th graders were presented with the waste workshop to correlate with their current class material with their teacher.
Students were asked to keep track of their waste or energy usage for three days before we came to visit them to see how much energy or waste they used when they weren’t considering their own impact. That Wednesday, we helped them creates hypotheses on how much energy or waste they believe they could reduce based on the tips that we presented to them. They were then asked to keep track of their energy or waste usage over the next couple of days until we met with them on Monday again to see their progress.
On Monday when we met with the students they had kept track of the number of hours they used energy and a tally of different types of waste they used. Helping with calculations, we worked with them to calculate the average energy and waste used as well as how it compared to their usage from the previous three days. They compared this difference to their hypothesis to see if they met their impact goal. Many students happily walked up to the computer to tell us how much energy or waste they saved.
Seeing the young students enthusiastic about lowering their impact gives us hope for a future where people are much more likely to prioritize the environment. Students were excited to share with us ideas they had to help our planet battle our waste and energy problems, including lots of space travel. 🙂
Our group will be starting to plan the next workshop for these students for the month of November.
Sustainable Earth 