Earth Day in August!

The entire group! P4, P5, P6 and teachers

The past few weeks I have been doing a lesson on “Mother Earth” with my P4-P6 students. We have learned everything from the land features of Thailand, parts of a plant, pollution to recycling. The students have loved the lessons and come into my office in the afternoon asking if they can draw more pictures about what they have learned. For the lesson on land features of Thailand, the students made books and drew and wrote all the land features. For parts of a plant they drew a flower and labeled it and I hung them in the room. For pollution I created a fish bowl out of recycled water jugs. Started with a clean fish tank and added trash, oil, and laundry soap to the water and asked if it was a clean or dirty environment and if the fish would die or survive (almost every meal for the kids in my family includes some kind of fish). For homework they made fish they hang from the classroom ceiling and the older classes drew pictures of dirty environments vs. clean environments. For recycling we learned about materials that can be composted, recycled or thrown in the trash. Students were each given a material and they had to divide up into groups according to where the “garbage” should be sorted. If I catch students picking up trash around the school they get a lottery ticket. (I noticed Krew Boo, teacher of P.6, has been giving the students work that relates to these lessons!)

the dirty fish bowl

P6 with their projects

book of land features

book

Am, Fai, Ning (P5) with clean vs. dirty pictures

 

P4 with their projects

P5 boys busy at work

P3 pointing to their fish

P6 continuing the lessons in their own classroom

school bus ride

Backing up a bit, back in March I met some guys who were overseeing the building of a solar power field just 5km down the road while eating lunch at Mah Nee and Paw Kit’s restaurant. They spoke pretty good English so after our chit chat they gave me their cards and said if I ever wanted to take the students there on a tour just to call them. Summer break was quickly approaching and other events were going on so I knew I couldn’t act on the offer. Then about a month back I got to thinking how much I had really wanted to do some kind of Earth Day project with my kids and hadn’t done it yet. I remembered the offer to take the kids to the Solar Field and the wheels began turning.

 I brought up the idea to my PA, principal, and he began making calls. He seemed just as excited about the opportunity as I was. He found out we couldn’t go because no one was there who could teach the kids, there were only security guards. I went ahead with the lessons described above despite not being able to go on our field trip. The following week he told me he had been in touch with people again and then last Monday I got to school and out of the blue he said, “Friday P4,5,6 will go to the Solar Cell”. It couldn’t have been more perfect timing because I was just ending my unit on Mother Earth.

We left around 9:30 Friday morning in a sawng tao to the Solar Field just down the road. We got there and there was a brief introduction to the grounds by looking over the map or all the different panels. I kept asking the teachers to translate a little bit but they were more concerned with the fact that one of the teachers happened to be wearing a lime green shirt that was nearly identical to the workers and kept interrupting their presentation. After the very brief introduction we got to go out to look at the panels. The guides showed us two boxes, from the little I understood, they are the switch boxes they control a set of 9 or so panels and then transfer the energy to be made into electricity. Again I couldn’t refer to my teachers because now they were off in their own world chit chatting and flirting with the security guard and then playing on the tractor and posing for pictures on it. Great role models for the kids!

at the solar plant

taking notes

The P.6 teacher Krew Boo was engaged though and was asking many questions trying to get more information out of the shy guides about the solar cell process. She was also the one semi keeping the kids focused. We were back to school by 10:45 and the students were sent home for rest of the day. A trip like this with a school back home would have taken up at least the morning if not the entire day followed by a follow up discussion and writing of thank you notes. I asked Krew Boo if students would be writing Thank You notes to Solar Power people. She said the PA had one ready from the school and I could write one if I wanted but the students wouldn’t be writing one. Later that afternoon she told me she talked to PA about writing letters and he thinks it is a good idea and so they are now going to write them. Her students are also the only students instructed to write up a report from the notes they took at the field.

Krew Boo is a great teacher. She is one of the only teachers I see dedicated to the students and teaching the students. Many times she stays in her classroom during lunch to help the students on projects. I have even seen her reading individually with the slower learners of the class. Whenever I have an idea about improving the school, like writing a Thank You note, she always agrees and says she has brought up the idea and the other teachers have turned it down. I swear they are more concerned about taking their morning massage from the students, their lunch time drinking party and their afternoon nap or hour early departure from school than helping to instill great knowledge into the minds of kids so eager to learn. Without Krew Boo at my school this year I don’t think I would have survived teaching at the school for a year.

Crazy teacher’s aside, I am grateful to my PA for helping to make the field trip go through. At least the students got a little glimpse of a cleaner form of energy and hopefully learned something about the greater world through my lessons leading up to the field trip. Not to toot my own horn, but I am really glad that I was able to help expand the classroom walls of Rong Rian Chok Amnuay and showed the school that taking field trips be a fun way to learning about something and apply what students have learned in the classroom to the real world.