Teaching the Rainforest

by Mindy
(Austin, Tx)

I have never visited a dense lush forest. However, I would love to in the future. I am a Kindergarten school teacher, therefore, I teach my students about recycling to save the rainforest and ask them what we can do to save the rainforest. This is a pretty important talk and they come up with the regular ways, such as recycling, not cutting down trees, etc.

Part of our lesson is reading the book, The Lorax. The kids really love it and get into the fact that people are polluting and killing our rainforest.

I am not sure if you are familiar with the program that Tropicana is doing (up until 2011). On every container of juice, they have a label that says something about saving the rainforest. If you put the code into their website, you save 100 square feet of rainforest. It is really neat because you can see how much of the rainforest you have saved and revisit it later to keep track of it. I have started a team and we have only saved 200 sq feet at this time but we are going to make sure to put in every code we can, so we can help save the rainforest a little at a time.

I think that if people are exposed to the rainforest and what is happening to it, they will be more likely to help out. Like the Tropicana thing, it was very easy to set up an account on their website and save 100 sq feet of land. We were already buying the product anyway, so how hard can it be to put it into the internet.

We need more opportunity to help out like that. Another thing that I think is important is to teach our children the importance of helping the rainforest. They are the future and what happens to the rainforest will be in their hands.

The problem is that the kids today are not given values from their parents. They are able to make them on their own and then control the family. Parents and teachers need to step up and take control of their children and show them how to be good citizens and rainforest helpers!

Barry's Response - Good ideas, Mindy. Like they say, the youth are the future, and the future is theirs. So if we can help them take care of what is theirs by teaching our children what we know to help, we are doing them a service. Thank you for your words.

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