The beaches we live next to are littered with trash. Also our school campus needs more green space. The entire campus is on concrete and black top only. Lastly the local native plant park and nature center need volunteers to help maintain and nurture the land they're on.
Our green team group will coordinate multiple community service opportunities for the students of Kinetic Academy. Our group is located near the beach which always has trash on it. We will coordinate beach clean ups which helps keep trash out of the ocean. This will help the environment and show students the impact of littering. We will also coordinate volunteering opportunities at the local nature center and native plant park. The community leaders of these locations help engage the students to become better connected with nature. The community leaders will share information about the trees, plants, birds, animals and insects and how they all work together. We also will continue to develop a green space on our school campus. Our entire campus is on strictly concrete and black top. There is no grass or soil! In the last 2 years our green team students have created a green space that consists of 7 raised garden beds and 4 vermicompost bins to fertilize the garden. 4 raised beds are butterfly gardens, 2 raised beds are vegetable gardens and 1 raised bed is dedicated to the teaching staff to enhance classroom projects. Our next project would be to build another raised garden bed that will focus on native plants. Our green team students will meet to decide which native plants they would like to grow next. With the guidance of the native plant park leader they will build and fill the new garden bed together. This new project will provide the proper environment for native insects and birds. It will also be enjoyed by all students and staff at our school.
This year our group project was to focus on supplying tools for beach and park clean ups for our volunteers. We noticed that during our clean ups not many volunteers had their own trash grabbers. We were able to purchase 20 trash grabbers for the clean ups. Our volunteers were very grateful to have trash grabbers to borrow making picking up trash easy and fun. We were also using plastic bags to put our trash in which made it feel like we were still adding to the problem we were trying to help. So we decided to repurposed flower buckets from the grocery store as trash receptacles. We drilled holes on each side of the bucket and tied rope to the ends so the rope became a handle to easily carry the reusable trash bucket. We were able to make 35 of these buckets which we can reuse for all of our future beach and park clean ups. Supplying trash grabbers and reusable buckets for trash to our volunteers made it easier, fun and sustainable for our clean up projects. Another project from our grant was to establish a native plants garden. Volunteering at the local native plant park we learned that growing native plants is important to provide a sustainable environment for many species in our area. Our grant helped us purchase 6 native plants from our local nature center where our group also volunteers at We bought 2 different colored coral belles, white sage, wooly blue curls and yarrow. We planted all of them together in a raised garden bed that's located on our school campus. Also because we still had some funds left over we were able to purchase materials to build a roof over our vermicompost bins to protect them from the rain and sun. Our group has learned that discovering local resources by volunteering in our community teaches us new ways to contribute to doing our part for the environment.
Our group has learned that discovering local resources by volunteering in our community teaches us new ways to contribute to doing our part for the environment.
Need more research about beneficial pollinator plants native to our area.
It's wonderful to see students excited and proud about the varieties and quantity of trash they've picked up. Also seeing students on campus walking up to the garden beds and having spontaneous conversations and curiosity.
We like to provide capes and masks for the students to borrow during the beach and park clean ups. The students feel like super heroes while volunteering for the community. The capes also help us identify our volunteers from afar. We also upcycled buckets that grocery stores use for flowers into trash receptacles. We simply drilled holes on each side of the bucket and tied rope to each hole. This made a handle to easily carry a reusable bucket to collect trash in during our organized beach and park clean ups.
