Fourth Graders Clean Up School Grounds for Earth Day

Fourth-grader Ethan Summers of Oswego darted across the grass behind the baseball diamond. He had his eye on something shiny on the ground. After picking it up with rubber-gloved hands, he realized what it was—a bite-size candy bar, still in its wrapper.

He excitedly bounded over to where his teacher, Melissa Hinshaw, was standing, an enormous garbage bag spread open between her hands. Summers deposited the candy bar into the bag, and then headed back to join his classmates, looking for more trash.

Summers and his fellow fourth-graders spent more than half an hour outside on Wednesday afternoon, cleaning up the grounds of . It was the culmination of a week spent learning about the history and meaning of Earth Day, and it was obvious from the faces of the students that heading outside and seeing the litter for themselves brought those lessons home.

In the end, they circled the school, with a detour around the baseball field, and collected enough to fill half of that trash bag. What did they find? Countless cigarettes, sticks of gum, plastic jewelry, socks, bandages, one long rusty screw, McDonald’s fries, a toothbrush, many scraps of newspaper, and in one case, the disembodied head of a Buzz Lightyear toy.

“I think it’s a great idea,” Summers said of the afternoon cleanup. “There’s a lot of trash along the street.”

This is the first time Hinshaw has done a school grounds cleanup with students at Long Beach Elementary, but she conducted several at a previous teaching job. She said the kids always enjoy it, and it gives them a chance to think globally but act locally, with immediate results.

“It teaches them to understand responsibility,” she said. “They didn’t put this garbage here, but they’re cleaning it up. It shows them there are problems in the world they didn’t create, but they will have to deal with."

Or, in the words of student Jordan Tomter of Oswego, “It helps for people to do what others don’t.”

Students were given strict rules for the cleanup. Rubber gloves were to be worn at all times. If broken glass was found, it was not to be touched, and Hinshaw was to be called immediately. (Every few minutes, someone would shout, “I found glass!”)

During the previous week, students learned about the value of protecting the environment, and discovered ways to make a difference in their homes and communities. They created t-shirts with the slogan "Waste Will Erase." Each student was asked to create an Earth Day poster, and they were given free rein to fill it with whatever information they chose.

Maddie Deany of Oswego used her poster to list off several of those specific ways to improve the planet, including recycling and reusing water.

“It’s our earth and we live on it, and we should help protect it, and not throw litter on the ground,” she said.

The students were wide-eyed and excited to get outside and start the cleanup. (Hinshaw said she was surprised by just how excited they were.) Some of them even coined a term for the activity: “Conasty,” a combination of “cool” and “nasty.”

Afterward, as the students sat at their desks thinking about what they had just seen around their school building, Hinshaw asked them the $20,000 question.

“What if nobody did what we just did?” she asked. “What do you think it would look like if no one did that?”