Simsbury Kindergartners and Fitzgerald’s Team Up to Help Earth

Simsbury Public Schools kindergarten classes have partnered with Fitzgerald’s Foods, on Hopmeadow Street in Simsbury, to help raise awareness about Earth Day. This year the event lands on Monday, April 22nd, and Simsbury kindergartners and their teachers are doing all they can to promote environmental awareness and urge residents to reduce, reuse, and recycle.

Earth Day was first established in 1970 in San Francisco, California, when smog was prevalent, and pollutants and pesticides were negatively impacting biodiversity at an alarming rate. People had had enough of industrial development’s irresponsible use of the planet’s resources. Thus Earth Day was implemented to celebrate the Earth and heighten awareness about the environment. Each year leading up to the event, Fitzgerald’s donates stacks of paper grocery bags for children to decorate. Simsbury’s kindergarten classes have participated in this event since 2008, when Andrea Pranaitis’ Central School class first began the tradition. Images and often creatively spelled words reflect the Earth Day themes that the students discuss in class before the projects. During the week of Earth Day, the bags are returned to the store, and Fitzgerald’s employees bag shoppers’ groceries with these visual reminders of the importance of environmental awareness.

At Central School, Kindergarten teacher Joanne Lukowicz opted for a bold look for her class’s grocery bags, employing washable paint rather than the more typical crayons or markers. Each table was set with four containers of paint and four brushes, which she cautioned should not be mixed, an instruction that the children adhered to quite well until the very end of class when a couple students experimented with the brush used for the pink paint accidentally finding its way into the tub of blue paint. (The two were delighted with the resulting purple hue.) Subtly reinforcing the message behind Earth Day, several of the paint pots in the classroom were repurposed yoghurt containers.

As the kindergartners decorated their bags with scenes of the earth and sky, as well some more gritty depictions of recycling trucks and trash cans, it was clear to them that this wasn’t just a simple art project, that their artwork had a very important purpose. One little girl pondered out loud an existential question related to her task. “What IS Earth?” she asked. One of her classmates leapt to his feet to help her out. With a dramatic foot stomp and sweep of his arms he said, “We’re on it right now!”

Lukowicz has been teaching for more than 20 years. She noted the increase in environmental awareness in her students over the years. She observed, “They think about recycling. They know where things should go, and they are concerned with not just recycling paper they use in the classroom, but containers and everything else.”

With all of the ominous reports about the health of the planet in the news of late, it bodes well that there exists some very environmentally aware little humans who care about the Earth and want to remind others to make the Earth a priority, not just on Earth Day but every day.

For more information about Earth Day, visit the Earth Day Network’s website at www.earthday.org/earthday.