Chatham High Green Team Partners With Elementary School Students

CHATHAM, NJ - The Chatham High School Green Team club teamed up with Milton Avenue School teachers and administrators to educate third graders on waste issues in honor of Earth Day.

On April 12, junior Naila Ismail and sophomores Lea Casano-Boris and Alli O’Brien spent the afternoon at Milton; they ran a station with several activities focused on waste issues with various groups of third graders.

The first activity that the CHS Green Team students did with the Milton students involved an “Ocean Timeline Guessing Game.” Milton students were presented with a bag of materials commonly found in the ocean; it included fishing line, a plastic water bottle, a diaper, and an aluminum can, among other items. In the bag were index cards with numbers of years printed on them, and the Milton students had to guess how long each item would take to decompose in the ocean.

“The Milton students were surprised to learn that items like plastic bottles and aluminum cans, which we may use for only a few minutes of our lives, will outlive us several times over if they aren’t recycled,” Green Team advisor Shannon Falkner said.

Next, the CHS students brought out a triple beam balance scale and taught the Milton students how it works. Then, they showed Milton students two different lunches: one packed in all disposable packaging and one packed using reusable containers. The CHS students supervised the Milton students as they weighed the waste from each lunch, and then they calculated how much waste would be saved per school year if the whole third grade committed to bringing reusable containers in their lunches.

The station concluded with sophomore Lea Casano-Boris instructing students in how to repurpose an old tee shirt into a reusable bag.

“I loved working with the students at Milton and I thought it was so amazing to see how all of the students were interested in the activities that we were doing,” O’Brien said.

“It was amazing to raise awareness amongst third graders and educate them on little changes that can make a significant impact. All of the students seemed to be really engaged and they enjoyed the activities that we had prepared for them," Ismail said. "I really enjoyed my experience of educating the future generation and making them excited to be environmentally conscious.”

Casano-Boris said the most rewarding part about working the youth in my community is seeing their reactions after we put our current climate crisis in perspective to them.

"It's such an amazing feeling to see younger students so motivated to make a change," Casano-Boris said. "I truly think that the greatest way to better our pollution situation is to continue to inspire future generations to continue our efforts. I feel that I learned just as much from this experience as the third graders did.”

SDOC Science supervisor Kristen Crawford said the collaboration between the students at Chatham High School and Milton Avenue School is one that is important on so many levels.

"It provides students at CHS the opportunity to share their knowledge, ideas, and passion for preserving our environment as well as practice public speaking and working with younger students. For our students at Milton Avenue School, we have provided a unique experience for Earth Day and made a connection to role models that they can emulate," she said. "We want them to walk away thinking, if high school age students are using reusable bags and caring about the environment, then I should too.”

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