Kids Vote!

Scholastic Weekly Environmental Vote
Scholastic is running a weekly vote on environmental topics. Not only can you visit the site and post your vote on the issue, but you can also read all about the environmental issue so you are more informed. The votes from kids everywhere will be tallied and the results posted on Earth Day.

Ideas For Our Blog

A Poll: Are you interested in surveying our school community and seeing how many people recycle, or surveying on another topic? We can announce the poll through email and at lunch periods, asking people to visit our site and respond to our poll. I think it could be interesting to see how many people recycle.
Earth Day: Are you interested in doing an activity or presentation for Earth Day? There is an Earth Day countdown on the sidebar of our blog. Clicking the Earth Day 2008 link takes you to a site about things happening on Earth Day. We might gather ideas from this site.
A Podcast: An audio podcast is a recording that can be downloaded to your iPod or computer, and then you can listen to it, kind of like a news cast. What about making a podcast recording our thoughts on the environment, and making the podcast available for download for our friends and family? We can link to the podcast from our blog, which makes it easy for others to access.
Challenge: Now that we are familiar with how the blog works, think about how much of it you have used- have you visited the links and learned more about environmental issues- have you posted comments that talk about environmental concerns, thoughts- have you shared sites or infom0ration from particular environmental sites- and have you read through the comments posted by others and responded to them?
Visitors: Check out our visitors! Faiz, from Evergreen Primary School has said hello Please offer a warm welcome! Faiz may be able to share what environmental issues are being discussed at Evergreen school.

Welcome Students from Evergreen Primary School, Singapore

Welcome to our blog; we hope you will enjoy reading our posts and looking at the links we've found. We also want to invite you to submit responses and comments, along with other links to interesting and helpful sites you've discovered. We're interested in knowing more about you personally and about your interest in the environment and the problem of global warming.

Our state, Tennessee, just had one of the worst outbreaks of tornadoes in the past 70 years; more than 30 people were killed. Many were injured and many buildings were destroyed.

February is very early for tornado activity and it was unusual to have such powerful storms so early in the season. What's the worst type of weather you have in Singapore? Has it been worse than usual in the past few years?

Keep Up the Good Work

Save and Sign members are doing a great job. I'm very glad to see so many making the effort to get to the computer lab in the morning on Tuesday or Thursday. However, I know this isn't possible for everyone and I hope that many of you will ask for permission to get onto the blog at home so you can read it and make contributions to it. We'll be opening access to the students from Singapore in the next week or so. Think about what you might like them to know about you or to learn about your thoughts and ideas about climate change and care for the environment. Thanks, Mr. Libonn

Banning Plastic Bags

Have you heard about banning plastic bags in the news? ecokids blog from Canada has a post about China banning plastic bags. Whole Foods has announced they will be banning plastic bags. I just purchased reusable bags at Publix ($1 a bag) for my grocery adventures. At this blog, you can see a YouTube video which highlights making bags out of recyclable bags. If you start looking more closely, you will see how the global movement to recycle is right in your neighborhood.

Planet Earth

My husband received the DVD Planet Earth for his birthday. We have been watching a little of it each night. It is incredible. You'll see all kinds of different biomes, animals- even rare and endangered, knock-out scenery...plus, you'll learn a lot. If you are looking for a great gift, this would be one that really helps you appreciate our beautiful planet. It also encourages me to work just a little bit harder at protecting what we have. One step I have taken is to recycle more at home. The movie- it is expensive, but worth the cost, in my opinion.

Getting Started

You made some nice contributions to the site today- exploring what we already have, suggesting some ways we can get others to look at our site- maybe with a poll, adding a comment to a post (from Snowbird), even finding a cool video on how to make a reusable bag by recycling ordinary plastic bags. Keep up the good work and watch our Web log grow!