By Erica Chayes Wida, Packet Media
This Wednesday as part of Princeton Public Schools’ sustainability initiative, Riverside Elementary School played its role — quite literally — in making classrooms even greener. Kindergarten teacher Jennifer Bazin and the Riverside Green Team, a group of teachers and parents dedicated to ecological progress in PPS, spearheaded an assembly the morning of Jan. 17 to spotlight the importance of an all-inclusive school-wide Green Team initiative., The assembly included a cast of students, custodians, cafeteria workers, teachers, and office staff, all of whom worked together to demonstrate a myriad of reasons why the school should continue to go green. Their audience consisted of kids in grades Pre-K through 5., The Third Grade Theater Club performed an original play that showed its peers the difference between recycling and composting. The club consists of students Zoie Rynolds, Eric Doczi, Mercy Ebong, Henry Armstrong, and Garbreille Abdel-Hillary. They also illustrated how necessary it is to be sure to sort waste into the correct bins in classrooms, bathrooms, and cafeterias., “I liked the play because it was cute. I learned that the bear was turning green on the inside — the word going green means to eat green food,” said kindergartner Audrey Taek. “We’re gonna compost and recycle every day.”, Composting is another proactive way the elementary schools are contributing to helping the environment and teaching students about how to practice sustainability. All the elementary schools in the district have a school garden and garden educators — an aspect of the PPS “Principles of Sustainability” passed in 2013 as part of the district’s ongoing health and wellness policy., The assembly performances did not end there. Teachers also displayed their acting skills with a series of short skits where they discussed implementing recycling and upcycling into their classrooms. One teacher, for example, hosted a game show called “Know Your Trash” where students in the skit called a friend up from the audience to help them sort their trash., Second grade teacher Gita Varadarajan has devoted an area of her classroom to creation projects where her students can make things from sound materials you’d typically throw out, and then get to gift their creations to others. One student upcycled two plastic water bottles on top of one another filled with water that drips down in 10 seconds. They gave it to Ms. Varadarajan who now uses it as a timer in her classroom to say, for example, “Ten seconds to come to the rug.”, Another Riverside upcycling project include laundry soap bottles that have been emptied, cleaned, had cut the bottoms off, and refashioned into a shovel and funnel for the playground., By the end of the assembly, the Green Team presented an incentive for kids to recycle and compost. They will all receive a calendar where they will check off every time they composted and recycled. At the end of the month, they will receive an award. The Green Team also announced its first ever Green Week Spirit Week program, which will include a week’s worth of daily sustainable tasks to get kids in the spirit of being green. These will include themes such as no-waste lunch day, make an outfit out of recycled items day, and turn off your electric day., “Going green means to recycle — to recycle is to be like helpful to the planet,” said kindergartner Lavinia Lord about what she learned from the assembly., “I think it was important to the children to have the concept — which we’ve had for some time — to ‘stop, think, and sort’ before they were throwing out their garbage,” said Green Team co-chair Jennifer Bazin. “They knew this tagline but the assembly reinforced this idea with skits and examples. They really got to see it in action and they really got to do it in cafeteria at the end of the day.”
