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Founded last year, Yale Environmental Education (YEE) aims to educate elementary school students in local public schools about pertinent environmental issues. We currently have five fourth-grade classes at Vincent Morrow Elementary School and Fairhaven Elementary School that pairs of Yale students visit on a monthly basis, focusing on a particular issue each visit. Focuses are waste and recycling, water quality, air pollution, energy, food, and climate change. Each pair stays with the same class throughout the year and comes for an hour each visit, with the hope of developing an ongoing relationship with the fourth graders throughout the year. Between lessons, members of YEE create the lesson plans for the next month. We try to make the lessons interactive and draw connections between environmental issues and the students’ everyday lives. For example, the waste lesson focused largely on how students can reuse and recycle, and the air pollution lesson highlighted the growing number of New Haven children diagnosed with asthma due to the city’s air. Each lesson ends with an art activity (e.g. for the waste lesson, decorating flower ‘vases’ out of plastic bottles to bring home) and some end with a more long-term project (e.g. for the energy lesson, creating an ‘energy patrol’ that makes sure that lights and appliances are turned off when the classroom is empty). Although the program is in its first year, we hope to expand the program over time. Anyone interested in participating as a teacher should contact veronica.gordon@yale.edu
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For more information about getting involved, or about YSEC generally, please contact: cornelia.twining@yale.edu
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This website was created in 2009 by MJ Truong.
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