Bulletin Club Green Tip #10: Ride your bike to school

Now that the weather's heating up, it's the perfect time to ride your bike or walk to school. Try to find at least one day each week to leave the car at home and reduce your carbon footprint. May 16-22 is Bike to Work Week, so we'll definitely be encouraging people to ride during that week, but for now, ride at least once a week. (Avoid rainy days like tomorrow, though, unless you're a super hard core environmentalist and in that case, we love you for being so brave!)

Yes this is a ridiculous picture, but it made you take a second look at the email, right? :)

ACE assembly encourages AVHS students to join Environmental Club

On Thursday, many of our school's science classes attended an assembly from the Alliance for Climate Education (ACE), an awesome organization whose goal is to raise awareness about global warming and empower young people to do something about it and to change their lifestyle, one thing at a time.


ACE website
ACE on Facebook
ACE blog
The presentation was creative, informative and encouraged a lot of students enough for them to sign up to join our club! It's very exciting. Our next meeting on February 26 will probably be our biggest meeting yet, so be prepared for the meeting to be super-charged with enthusiasm about saving our planet.

We'll probably each choose our DOT (Do One Thing), as ACE encouraged us to. Everyone will choose one thing they want to change and they'll do that over the course of the following two weeks (kinda like our green tips and challenges, only everyone will have their own personal DOT).

We may film a bulletin commercial with everyone who comes to the meeting. The sheer volume of people may be a great way to encourage others to join, so we may go film a short commercial on the field. Everyone could stand behind one speaker and then at the end we could all shout some awesome phrase to encourage people to join.

By that point, I should have a comprehensive list of Earthweek events in the community and Leadership will have met with our club's officers and Mrs. Turner. We'll go over the events we discussed at our last meeting for our new members and I'll probably make an agenda like last time so people can follow along.

Don't forget to be thinking about ways to reduce the amount of litter in your lunch. We will have a discussion about that at our next meeting, as well.

See you all February 26 in E5 at lunch!

Melissa

ACE: Alliance for Climate Education

As you may be aware, our club will be participating in an event presented by ACE (Alliance for Climate Education) . Our club will be creating a set of questions or ideas for classroom discussions that the science classes can use after seeing the presentation in May. We will see the presentation in February on the 18th, so we will have an idea of what kinds of questions would be good to ask.

We also received a packet of background concepts, comprehension questions and terms. It will be very useful in helping us think of questions to create for the science classes. I can scan the packet and email it to you all. I think we should all have a copy by February 18 so we can have some background knowledge before watching the presentation.

To get a better sense of the presentation, here are some of the terms and questions listed:
- greenhouse gas
- greenhouse effect
- human-caused greenhouse effect
- fossil fuel
- atmospheric concentration
- emissions
- carbon footprint
- What does the ozone layer have to do with global warming?
- Name four of the main natural greenhouse gasses.
- Where do fossil fuels come from and how are they created?

From their website:

"ACE performs 45-60 minute interactive assembly presentations for high school
students that explain global climate change and its effect on our planet, while
offering solutions. Our program is scientifically based, interactive and
energizing - and we present it at no cost to schools."

I encourage you to look through the organization's website at http://www.acespace.org/. There are ways to "take action" and learn more about climate change. They even have a blog! I told you guys blogs are cool :-)