We are excited to report that Grace Preschool is participating in our second year of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Ocean Plastic Pollution Summit (OPPS). The Summit, which Grace staff attends three times throughout the year, focuses on developing an understanding of plastic pollution in the ocean and how to engage children in service learning projects to help reduce plastic pollution. Last year, our Kinder Prep students engaged in a service learning project to minimize single use plastics in our snacks at Grace Preschool (morning and afternoon classes). We appreciate everyone’s dedication to the effort and were thrilled to report back to the Aquarium our results – the 227 piece count done in October 2012 was reduced to an 87 piece count done in April 2013!
This year the M-TH’s service learning project will continue to focus on reducing single use plastic at snack time and will broaden to include content on plastic bags. Our baseline plastic count for this year is even better – 74 for the 3 weeks in December! We will keep a plastic count each day for 3 weeks each month through April. Our baseline number is impressive, but let’s see if we can’t reduce it even further. The biggest culprits were, as always, gogurts and string cheese. Look for more information about the plastic pollution problem and how to help with reduction efforts coming soon from the M-TH class.
– Trish Kawahara, Teacher (M-Th Class)