You may have noticed the large banner hanging in the window of the cubby room and if you haven’t, be sure to check it out! The beautiful banner is from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, commemorating our successful efforts to reduce single use plastic at Grace last school year. For those of you who participated in that effort last year, we thank you! We were able to significantly reduce the amount of single use plastic used at Grace over a 6 month period last school year. The project and the accompanying student work was shared at an end of the year presentation and again at the opening Plastic Pollution Summit and was referenced as a model of a successful data oriented, service learning project. We are pleased to continue this work with this year’s class and with you, our parents. In January we started the tally sheets (hanging on the door between the classrooms). Our January number was 123 pieces of single use plastic generated in the first three weeks of January. February we were down to 71! Repeat offenders are individual cheese sticks, gogurts, and baggies. 
– Trish Kawahara, Teacher (M-Th class)