On Earth Day, students at Elm Street Elementary in Rome celebrated with many special guests from around the community. They also participated in some very unique recycling projects in honor of Earth Day.

This was the second annual Earth Day Celebration at Elm Street. Anita Sealock, a third grade teacher at Elm Street, came up with the Earth Day Celebration when she realized that the school should be doing more to participate in Earth Day.

“I got tired of Earth Day coming and going and us not doing anything,” said Sealock.

Sealock explained that before she started the Earth Day Celebration at Elm Street the school did very little for Earth Day. She said that in the past the students may have simply done Earth Day worksheets and watched a video, but she didn’t think that those activities were teaching much responsibility.

“We have got to teach children to be more responsible in order to make a difference,” said Sealock.

The Earth Day Celebration at Elm Street lasted the whole school day with a kick off at 8:15 a.m. and a recycling project to wrap up the day. This was a schoolwide event that not only included all grade levels, Pre-K through sixth, but faculty and staff as well. The lunch ladies even wore their recycling t-shirts.

Students split up into grade level groups and visited different stations throughout the day to learn about how each special guest helps with environmental conservation.

Some of the special guests included Smokey Bear from the Forestry Department, ReRe from the Rome/Floyd Recycling Center, Georgia Power, the Coosa River Basin Initiative and the Boy Scouts. These guests educated the students on what they do to help with environmental conservation as the students came around to their station.

The guest speaker for the Earth Day Celebration at Elm Street was Marie Lewis, a teacher at Coosa High School.

Sealock explained that the main goal of the Earth Day Celebration was to teach kids how to take care of the Earth and hope that they would go home and teach their parents what they learned.

“I feel like we have so many parents that don’t know a lot about environmental conservation and I would like for the students to be able to go home and teach their parents,” said Sealock.

In addition to the students alternating stations throughout the day, at the end of the day each grade level participated in a different recycling project.

First grade recycled baby food jars and took a walk to pick up litter, second grade made pencil holders out of tin cans, third grade made a puzzle out of old calendar scraps, fourth grade made birdhouses using gallon jugs, fifth grade decorated jars to use them for trinket containers and sixth grade recycled plastic bottles to make vases.

Students have seemed to enjoy this event and have learned a lot from it. Sealock thinks that this is a great way to teach kids how to take care of the Earth and let them have fun at the same time.

Morgan Clemones is a student at Pepperell High School and is interning at the Rome News- Tribune.