My class reads Time for Kids, an 8-page new magazine, each Wednesday night. In December, “TFK” gave out a homework sheet asking kids to give President Obama advice and to mail in our responses. We did, and guess what showed up in last week’s magazine? A green morsel of wisdom from Becky, one of my students, was pulled from her letter and put at the top of a page for millions to read! Check it out!
A BIG CONGRATS to Shady Hill School’s 4th grade in Cambridge, MA for breaking 1,000! 4th grade teacher (and new daddy!) Drew Mackay reports:
Once again our Catalog Canceling Challenge was a success with a grand total of 1,008! We tracked our totals weekly, made math problems with the number of catalogs canceled, and created a bulletin board for the rest of Shady Hill to see our results and to share our impact. It was a great learning experience for everyone and we continue to find catalogs to cancel. We plan to take this challenge on again next year, although we hope someday it won’t be needed.
We celebrated reaching our goal by having a “Green Day” where my colleagues and I dressed up and sprayed our hair green for a day. We also made bandanas for the kids and painted their faces. It was A LOT of fun! Unfortunately we couldn’t get a good aerial photo of our catalog sign that read, “Save the Trees” in which “Trees” was actually spelled out in the design of trees.
I’m now learning that last spring 50 students in the fifth grade at Phoenix Country Day School in Paradise Valley, Arizona canceled about 400 catalogs. Congratulations PCDS!
Park’s Middle Division smashed our 4,125 canceled catalogs record from two years back, and I’m giddy to report that 170 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders canceled 4,466 unwanted sales catalogs. 38 kids canceled 60 or more to get a One Tree Club patch. Several canceled 120 and will get the Two Tree Club patch! Two others are in the Eight and Nine Tree Club (see post below).
Our efforts will stop 26,796 catalogs from being made and mailed in the next 12 months (assuming 1 cancellation stops 6 future catalogs from production) and will save 74 trees! This will also save a tremendous amount of water (75,000 gallons) and energy use (3 “cars worth” of CO2 stopped).
Borrowing an idea from Shady Hill teacher, Drew Mckay, 12 Park teachers told the kids we’d dye our hair green or wear green wigs for a day if they could break the old record. And now they have. Uggg.
Enjoy a slide show about our CCC. Green hair to be added next Tuesday!
I am compelled to write a special post to Becky and Chris. These 4th and 5th grade students are the Tom Brady and Peyton Manning of canceling catalogs. When we started the One Tree Club this year, they came in as the first to reach 60 canceled in only 3 or 4 days! From then on each night, they were canceling massive amounts of catalogs. They put in dozens of hours in their mission to help our planet.
In just 30 days using CatalogChoice.org, Chris canceled 556 unwanted sales catalogs! Becky used the phone and canceled a whopping 511! That’s a combined 1,067 canceled catalogs, these two will save 17.5 trees in one year’s time! Two kids. 17.5 trees. Stunning.
Special thanks to these two, and also their neighbors who gave them so many catalogs that they no longer wanted. Also, to their parents who got their colleagues to bring in hundreds of unwanted catalogs, too. Becky and Chris, you are my catalog canceling heroes. Many people and the planet owe you their appreciation for your hard work.
Here’s the latest class video about the CCC project and our new patches. Enjoy!
Students who cancel 60 catalogs personally can join the ONE TREE CLUB and we’ll send you this patch.
By canceling 1 catalog, you stop 6 from production, figuring conservatively.
If 360 catalogs come from one tree (19 billion catalogs divided by 53 million trees per year), then canceling 60 stops 360 and saves one tree. Using this DOWNLOADABLE LOG (click here) kids can track their canceling and aim for 60.
We’ve started our third annual CCC at Park School, and kids are going door-to-door in their neighborhoods and asking relatives if they can cancel their catalogs! This new club idea is pretty inspiring to them…and they don’t even know yet that I’m getting patches made for kids who reach 60!
Let me know if you need me to send you patches for your kids by emailing CatalogCancelingChallenge@gmail.com. I have extras!
I sewed one patch to an old hat which looks pretty nice on my dog and my son!
And here’s our TWO TREE CLUB patch for any kids who cancel 120 catalogs or more!
Jeny Randall from Tenacre Country Day School in Wellesly, MA sent in the following post about their spring CCC. Congrats to Tenacre 1st to 6th graders for cancelings 668 catalogs!
“How many of you get catalogs at home in the mail?” The students were settling onto the floor for our morning assembly and every hand went into the air. A few students offered estimates of how many they received: 3, 10, 5 a day. “So if we have 200 families at Tenacre, how many catalogs do you think we receive as a school?” The answer is a LOT!
Over the next four weeks, students eagerly canceled catalogs at home and ran to the science room before classes started to add their catalogs to the growing pile. Children stopped me in the hallway to update me on their latest cancellations: “Ms. Randall — I canceled 3 catalogs last night! I’ll bring them in tomorrow.”
In a friendly competition, each grade had its own stack, and thus the catalogs created a living graph demonstrating which group had canceled the most. 30 days later students poured in during recess to tally each grade’s accomplishments. 600, 610, 620… excitement grew as we counted the stacks and arrived at 668, 68 catalogs above our school-wide goal of 600. For their efforts students celebrated with 668 extra seconds of recess. While a second sounds like a short amount of time and canceling one catalog seems a small act — when they worked together our students were delighted to discover how much it adds up!”
Here’s a recent Huffington Post article I wrote about 350.org … and my son’s connection to a few Atlantic Harbor Seals on our way home from the Boston 350 festival.
The CCC is now featured in the new addition of “50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth,” I’ve been told. With over 1 million copies in print, this is the world’s best selling environmental text for kids. I’m not sure how they found out about our project, but we’re very grateful to be included and hope our idea helps their new text reach and teach more and more kids the ways and whys of going green. We’re also on their webpage under “at school.”
950 students at The Timberlane Middle School in Pennington, New Jersey, canceled 1,614 catalogs this spring according to principle Tony Suozzo. Congratulations Timberlane!! Special recognition goes to the Apollo team in 6th grade for canceling 293 catalogs. To see a slide show of Timberlane’s results that Principle Suozzo made, click here.
1 - The CCC got some nice press in NAIS’s summer 2009 issue of Independent School Magazine (click to read). Thanks NAIS! I hope many more independent schools will join our effort next year.
2 - Our project won an award this spring! We won the “Green Difference Award” for “Outstanding Environmental Project” from the greenschools organization.
3 - The CCC is now also featured here on Facing the Future’s website full of great educational resources that address poverty, population, consumption, peace/conflict, and environment.
Fifth grade Girl Scout Troop 722 from Waunakee, Wisconsin, sent in the report below. They canceled 586 catalogs collected from four Waunakee schools! In the process they ended up on TV, too!
“Thank you for such a wonderful ‘green’ project. We got the idea from a link posted by our Girl Scout Council. The troop was very excited to help the environment. We even showed the “Bob the Penguin” video and explained the challenge at an all school assembly on our “kick off” day.
“In keeping with the “green” theme, we emailed a letter home explaining the challenge to parents. One of our teachers liked the idea so much he emailed the information to the entire school district staff. We put a collection box in each of our 4 elementary schools right next to teacher mailboxes and asked each classroom to collect also.
“Word was spreading – catalogs stacked up! One of the best things that happened is a local TV station has their own “Green” reporter. Somehow he heard about the challenge! The girls were very excited to find out that he wanted to do a story about their work! The photo you see is from the day of the TV interview. In all, we collected and canceled 586 catalogs in a 4 week time period.”
Lizzy DeVan at The Brunswick School in Greenwich, CT emailed today with their results. The 1st to 4th grade boys (it’s an all-boys school) canceled 677 catalogs! The CCC was organized by student members of Bruswick’s “Green Bruins” club (Charlie Burdett, Sean Redahan, Jackson Brymer, Max Bergstein, Jared Wofson) with help from Ms. DeVan. They also made a movie about it that I can’t wait to see. 3rd grader Max Bergstein wrote the fantastic blog post below. Thanks Max!! Well said!!
“The experience of canceling catalogs was one I’m glad I had. Canceling catalogs was a fun way to save our trees and the animals who live in them. I thought canceling catalogs would be difficult and the people who answered the phone wouldn’t be friendly. Actually, the people I spoke with were very friendly and the process of canceling was quick and easy. I realized that if everyone spent a few minutes on the phone asking to be removed from mailing lists they don’t want to be on, we would save millions of pounds of paper. Trees would not be cut down and they could keep on living and soaking up carbon dioxide, which cleans our air and helps us all breathe better.”
180 PreK to 5th graders at the North Warren Central School in Chestertown, NY wrapped up their CCC. They canceled 417 sales catalogs and loved to project! 4th grade teacher and organizer, Cheryl Erickson writes:
“Thanks for sharing this great project with everyone and for creating such a wonderful web site to support it. You made it very interesting, informative and easy(!) to use the resources that you provided to duplicate the CCC in our school.
“The kids had a terrific time spreading the word and collecting and analyzing the data. I’m already planning next year’s challenge for November. You have so many great ideas on the website. Thanks for all of the work that you’ve put into it. When the class saw how many trees were saved when everyone working together, they became really motivated. It was a very empowering project. Thanks again.”
The John C. Page school canceled 458 catalogs this month! They’re ending with a special ceremony next week where their Green Team will present green books to their library.
Today’s post was written by Kate’s 2nd graders at The Children’s School in La Jolla, CA (near San Diego). Thanks to Laura Lavoie, Lauren Karkenny, and Carrie Orsborn for organizing! Their strategy was having the entire school collect cats for several weeks, then 50 student members of their Green Team and 15 teachers canceled 850 catalogs on April 19-22.
“Hello from California! We were really excited about the CCC. Each class tried to bring in as many catalogs as they could. Kids in toddlers through sixth grade brought in catalogs and put them in a box by their classrooms. The Green Team counted all the catalogs in each class’s box. They wanted to see who had the most and who won our challenge. The whole school collected 1,595 catalogs, and the second grade brought in 328 catalogs. The second grade won our challenge (click on photo)!”
“Then, during Earth Week, The Green Team and other people at school canceled 850 catalogs and it helped the environment. The challenge is important because it saves water, trees, electricity, carbon dioxide, pollution, gas, oil, and us.
“Facts we learned from the CCC: We saved six trees. Canceling catalogs helps the environment. Riding your bike or walking can save energy, too. You can cancel your own catalogs at home. Thank you for starting the Catalog Canceling Challenge. We had lots of fun!”
My students wrote these poems Earth Day Morning, edited and practiced reading yesterday, and we filmed today during a nature walk. During our walk we got to watch an Eastern Ribbon Snake sunbathe then swim in a stream.
dear earth,
thank you for a small triangle of light on the hayfield before the sunset turns mt. kearsarge purple.
thank you for a moon rising huge out of the ocean at plum
thank you for the scent of magnolia at dawn and the sound of peepers at dusk,
the sound in winter of trees swaying in the winter woods,
the scent of freshly cut hay in summer.
thank you for the light shafts coming through the barn sides onto the center floor at the equinox and the noisy birds inside to welcome it.
and too for the oriole returning each spring, the beaches of scotia, the meadows of montana, the hills of missouri and our beautiful woods in nh.
so much gratitude.
