Environmental Lessons!

Please post a comment here and tell me what you did/are doing in your classes!

I'll start.

For my pre-school classes (especially new kids), I'm teaching adjectives (clean/dirty, etc.) in relation to the earth, using pictures that I drew.

Elementary school classes with more experience, I'm using the "Where does garbage go?" which some of you, who saw my presentation at the general meeting, saw. It's a great review of regular vocabulary of things the kids have learned already.

For my returnee class, I think we're going to do a Venn Diagram of garbage that can be recycled and sort them into categories. The goal there is to get them talking... which is a problem for one of my classes, but not at all for the other.

I'm very glad to see people have been accessing this site! Let me know if you need any kind of help; I'll do my best!

Also-- some articles for your adult classes that I found in the news today that arerelated to the environment:

The End of Cheap Clothes is Near Thanks to the idea of BioFuels (which I am not too enthusiastic about because of the continued necessity of fossil fuels to make ethanol, farm equipment, land use -- it's a temporary situation for our energy crisis at best!), BioFuel-crops could mean less growing of cotton and other textile-related crops, but worse yet is the lack of growing food-crops.

Global Rice Supply Article with video about the rice supply shortages...

Assessing the Global Food Crisis An entire extra 100 million people have been pushed into poverty... Quote from the article: "The rises are due to a lethal combination of high fuel costs, bad weather in key food producing countries, the increase in land allocated to bio-fuels, and a surge in demand - much of it from the rising middle classes of China and India."

The Cost of Food Another BBC article, with graphs and pictures. Look at who is being impacted the most. It's *not* us, but those who can't afford to lose more! This *should* shock you.

How Ethanol is Made

The Controversy of Ethanol Thank you, Wikipedia!


Don't forget to use both sides of your paper, and recycle it after both sides have been used!