York Avenue goes green for Earth Day
Students learn lessons while replanting outside school
LANSDALE >> Students at York Avenue Elementary School spent their Earth Day making the outside, and the inside of their school a little greener.
Fourth, fifth, and sixthgraders spent Thursday morning raking, shoveling, picking up and planting, for an Earth Day school beautification project, while smaller students learned what it takes to go green.
“I don’t think we really care too much about the cold day, because we’re just happy to be outside. The sun is shining, and we are really looking forward to seeing the finished product of a beautiful school,” said school Acting Principal Nicole Berical.
Thursday’s planting marked another day in a week full of Earth Day-related activities, including a walk around the school on Monday, lessons on how to save the planet Tuesday, a ‘Wildlife Wednesday’ lesson on different habitats, and a planned ‘Wildflower Friday’ live assembly with a local beekeeper.
As the principal spoke outside the school’s front entrance, classes of students took turns weeding the flower beds along the front wall, picking plant debris and placing it into trash cans, then shoveling mulch from a pile into buckets — the mulch, buckets, tools, seeds and plants were all donated by school parents — and spreading the mulch onto the flowerbeds amid freshly planted greenery.
“We’re really enlisting the help of our fourth, fifth, and sixth-graders with a lot of the work to beautify the outside of the school,” Berical said, as masked students carried their rakes, shovels and buckets back and forth — and tried to remember how long it had been since they spent that much time away from their computers.
“But our kindergarten through third grade students are also working on planting their own seeds, so that by the time they get to be fourth-graders, they know how to help out,” she said.
Just around the corner from the front entrance, near a side playground, those kindergartners made an appearance, marching from shadows into sunlight, holding biodegradable cups containing soil, to a table where they could select seeds. Teachers and older students then handed over the seeds, which the kindergartners tamped down with their fingers, before getting a spray of water and hearing the three key ingredients for plant care: sunlight, water, and love.
“With the year that we’ve had, we’ve had a lot of times that we’ve had to say no to certain activities, especially the fun ones. So we were really looking for a safe way to come together, to do something nice for our school,” Berical said.
“They’re getting out of class, but they’re really learning how to work together, for a good common purpose, of our school. It’s a great break from technology.”