Happy Birthday, Earth!

Wednesday (22/04/2009)

a) Earth Day.
* We did a poem on "seed".
Teacher: So, why is today speacial?
Jen Ning: Is th Earth’s birthday….(all giggle).
Teacher: It’s true. How is the earth today?
Everyone knows that the earth is sick….relating it to our previous topic; Pollution of last year.
Last year we gave each kid a plant. More than 10 kids’ plants are still at home, growing. About 4 kids’ plants are not growing. So, I explained to them that some of these plants are more for decoration purposes. They would not grow tall. Some died! Some disappeared.

b) How do plants help?
Yun Zhe: They give us clean Oxygen. Teacher: That’s good!
Kids learnt about O2 and CO2. We breathe in O2 and breathe out CO2. Meanwhile, in the day, trees breathe in O2 and CO2.
If there is too much CO2 in the Earth, global warming would be more serious. It’s like a blanket covering the sky and all the hot and poisonous gas is trapped.
Jian Wei: The fish would die.
That’s true. Every year, the water temperature increases. As in Antartica, Polar Bears are losing their glacier homes. Some died of waether change, some died of searching for a new home. Some died of being unable to look for sufficient food!
What we can do is to plant more trees and use paper wisely.

c) How do vegetables help?
Vegetables keep growing and play the same role as trees.
Ze Yan: Hee…teacher! Can the green toys give out CO2 and take in O2? The class giggled…….!
Teacher: Well…..only if they have roots, Ze Yan!
Commercial vegetables used chemicals to provide fresh and beautiful plants. These chemicals would flow into the Body of Water when the rain washed away the leaves. Of course, they are harmful to water animals also to our underground water.
Furthermore, too much pesticides spraying would also contribute to poisonous air to our Earth.
We would be different! We use garbage enzyme as the fertilizer. It is recycled from fruit and vegetable wate and skin.

d) Transferring our vegetables!
We had earlier planted Red lady Fingers, Cherry Tomatoes and watermelon. This is the third week.
A few plants are already about 6 cm. Some are still sprouts. A few did not even grow.
We were so lucky that the pots and soil were presents from Qian Thong’s father who operates a Nursery Shop! Qian Thong is a 6-year old kid from another class.
Thus, each kid took a pot and washed them clean. Then they used the spades to scoop the earth and fertilised soil. They mixed them together.
I showed them how to transfer the already grown little plants into the new pots. They were so serious and excited. We watered them. Then, we labelled our names.
We would talk about some important team work on “planting” tomorrow to ensure our plants bear fruits and vegetables.