Sprouts of Hope: Writing a Book For Kids and Families

Energy Lite: Using Kill A Watt Meters to Reduce Energy Use

By The Sprouts of Hope

Last April the Sprouts of Hope organized an exhibit for the Cambridge Science Festival, and we used our exhibit to help kids understand more about energy, how we use it and how we can find out how much energy we use in our homes. We showed parents and kids how a Smart Meter works; it measures energy use in our entire house. And we had set up a display with Kill A Watt meters that showed how much energy is saved by using fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) instead of incandescent ones.

A Kill A Watt meter is monitor that tells you exactly how much electrical power an appliance in your home is using. Using it can help you cut down on your carbon footprint.

So, when we plugged a hairdryer into one of our Kill A Watt meters at the exhibit and turned it up to high, the grown-ups and kids couldn't believe how much energy it took to dry their hair. A lot of them told us that they would never dry their hair again!!

This is when we first had the idea of writing a book for kids and parents about using Kill A Watt meters at home. If they had a book and a Kill A Watt meter, parents could find ways to reduce their energy bills and kids could learn about how much energy is consumed by the things they use everyday. And when they find out how much energy they are using, we thought they'd use these things less often or in more efficient ways.

Actually, the idea of writing such a book -- and donating the book and a Kill A Watt meter to the Cambridge Public Library system -- was suggested to us by John Tagiuri. He's a great friend of the Sprouts and had helped us to set up our Cambridge Science Festival exhibit. He'd also taken photographs of us as the Statue of Liberty holding a CFL bulb. [Here's a picture Melissa took of us when John was taking photos of us.]

This fall we started working on Energy Lite, the book we've now written. And while you might think that the topic of Kill A Meters might be a boring subject to write about, it turned out to be a lot of fun, especially when John took pictures of us doing the experiments that we write about in the book. It took us a while to come up with how we'd tell a good story about Kill A Meters and also the best ways to describe what they are and how parents and kids could use them. To figure this out, we brainstormed ideas and then we wrote our ideas on pieces of paper -- describing what we might include on each of these pages.

Then we spread these pages on the floor and rearranged them until we figured out the best order for them in the book. And that's

how our book came to life. We didn't include everything in it that we first thought we would, and as we went along we changed our minds about drawing pictures to go along with our words -- even after we'd already drawn quite a few pictures. [You can see what one of our early page designs looked like.] That's when we decided to use photographs.

Each of the Sprouts was responsible for thinking about and writing two of the pages -- and Maya worked on drawing the cover.

After several meetings, when we reviewed what we'd written and drawn, we'd do the same thing all over again; we'd put our pages on the floor and see how they fit together. And as we wrote more words and thought more about the images to go with them, we started to read them out loud to each other to see if what we'd written made sense. We also wanted to be sure that we were also telling a good story.

Then it was time for our photo shoot with John, who is an amazing photographer and such a great partner with the Sprouts of Hope. We had ideas about what pictures we wanted to use on various pages, so we spent a couple of hours taking ones of all of us using the Kill A Watt meter with different appliances -- a hairdryer, of course, a laptop computer, a toaster over and the light bulbs.

We printed all of photographs that John took and then we became photo editors and selected the ones that we wanted to use in the book. That's when Melissa, who mentors the Sprouts of Hope, took our words and images and worked with her friend, Lois Fiore, who designed the book on her computer.

Now that we are done writing and editing the book, we are going to meet with the director of the Cambridge Public Library system to talk about donating our book and Kill A Watt meters to the main library and to all of its branches. We want families to be able to check it out -- just like they'd check out a book or a DVD from the library. We are trying to figure out how we can get it printed. And we also want to figure out how to spread the word about this book so that maybe other kids will want to write one for their library. It would be wonderful to create a kind of Kill A Watt library all over the country -- and then in cyberspace, too.

Once our book is in the library, we will encourage other people to make similar books and spread the word about conserving energy!

Sprouts of Hope: Passing Down What We've Learned

From Sprouts To Brotes

By Eliza

My Bat Mitzvah is in March. For my community service project, my Sprouts of Hope sisters and I are putting the idea behind Roots & Shoots/New England’s Sprouts of Hope fund into action! The Sprouts Of Hope Fund offers a way for people to donate money to help start Roots & Shoots’ groups in low-income and poor schools and communities. As the Sprouts of Hope, we contribute each year from our fundraising activities. [If you want to donate, check out The Sprouts of Hope Fund section on the right side of our blog. We did a cool video to tell why we think it’s such a great way to help other kids, and we put it on YouTube. Click on the link to take a look and listen.]

With my bat mitzvah project, however, we are helping to start a group in a different way. At a bilingual school in Cambridge, MA called Amigos a group of second graders recently joined Roots & Shoots. They named themselves after us - "Brotes de Esperanza," which is Spanish for "Sprouts of Hope." One day each month, I and two other members of The Sprouts of Hope volunteer by doing fun projects with the Brotes. We plan and lead their lessons and projects with the help of a Roots & Shoots intern and a parent of one of the Brotes.

The first time we went to Amigos was on a Wednesday in late October. We helped the Brotes make collages about the environment and then made Halloween decorations and toys out of recycled materials. We talked a little bit about global warming and how to have a "Green Halloween," since they were going to dress up the next week as either a princess or a ninja.

Then we discussed Waste-Free lunches. We'd brought in the many posters, photos, lunch trays, water bottles, and utensils that we collected and saved from our Waste-Free lunch project at our school.

We also introduced them to what we call the 6 R's (rethink, renew, reduce, reuse, recycle, and rot) and explained to them why waste-free lunches are good for the environment. We passed around water bottles, trays, containers, and utensils, some of which were reusable and some of which weren't.

They got really excited when we talked about reusable lunch boxes and they all jumped up and ran to get their lunch boxes. They were also very excited about sorting through the photographs we brought that showed different ways of packaging food. Using the photos as illustrations, we debated whether a six-pack of small soda cans was better or worse for the environment than drinking soda from one bigger bottle. The kids were very smart and knew a lot about waste-free lunches and the environment. One kid even had a solar panel on her roof at home!

The next month we went there, the kids celebrated autumn by making recycled bookmarks out of leaves. Also, in honor of Thanksgiving, they all wrote something that they were thankful for on a leaf and then they strung their leaves on a homemade paper tree. During that visit we talked with them about composting and discussed why it is good for the environment. (Since we do composting at our school and have visited the composting farm where our food waste is taken, we had a lot of stories to share with them.)

We let them touch some real compost with worms in it! They loved the worms especially. They colored in posters that we designed for an event we did in October, the City Sprouts festival, where we celebrated our school gardens. The posters said in big bubble letters "WE WANT COMPOST AT OUR SCHOOL!" They colored in the posters and planned to hang them up in the halls of their school so they could convince their principal, teachers and students to get composting going in their cafeteria.

We have done so many fun projects with the Brotes. One month, we taught them about bottled water. We introduced them to Think Outside The Bottle, the international anti-bottled water campaign. We also let them do a blind taste test between bottled and tap water.

A different month, we talked about homelessness. The Brotes all brought socks to their meeting to donate to our sock drive to benefit Boston Health Care for the Homeless (www.bhchp.org).

Among other things, the Brotes have learned about endangered species and watersheds.

One month, when we focused on recycling, we even got to make recycled paper with them (out of old newspapers)! It was really fun!

So far, working with the Brotes has been fun and educational for the Sprouts. The Brotes are very smart. They know more about global warming and the environment than a lot of adults. I hope that our partnership with the Brotes will continue, even though my Bat Mitzvah will soon be over. It's been fun and amazing to share our Roots & Shoots experiences with these kids -- taking what we've learned and passing it down to them: from Sprouts to Brotes.

Sprouts of Hope: New England Roots & Shoots Youth Summit

Learning Why To Use Reusable Water Bottles

By Eve

On Saturday, November 14 the Sprouts of Hope went to the annual Roots & Shoots Youth Summit in Boston. At the start, Sally Sharp Lehman, who directs the New England chapter of Roots & Shoots, talked about the Jane Goodall Institute, specifically its Africa program and how it is working and planning to take care of more and more orphaned chimpanzees.

Awards were also presented to regional Roots & Shoots groups as a way of showing appreciation for the efforts they made during the year. For the second year in a row the Sprouts of Hope were recognized as the “outstanding group” in the New England region, and this year our adult leader, Melissa, was named the region’s “Outstanding Group Leader.”

Throughout the rest of the day, we went to our various workshops. And during the lunch break, John Taguiri, a photographer and artist who has partnered a lot with us on projects, took photos of all of the kids who came to the Youth Summit.

John set it up a mini-photo studio at the summit so the people would be shown kicking away plastic water bottles while holding a reusable water bottle. And they would be standing on top of the world. It looked really cool. You can see what it looked like when Lilly posed for the picture.

Lilly, Eliza, Risa, and I went to a workshop called “Drop of Hope - Bottled Water and Our Public Water System.” This workshop inspired me to not drink bottled water. We learned that all bottled water is really just tap water that is purified. Then, it is sold for around $1.75 a bottle, when you could be getting almost the same water for a few cents at home. But when you are drinking water at home, you aren't putting plastic into the landfills, or the ocean.

There is a giant island of trash in the Pacific Ocean called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It is an island of floating plastic and debris that is two times the size of Texas. It is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean right now, but it's heading toward Hawaii. Since it is in the middle of the ocean, it's nobody’s property, so it's nobody's responsibility to clean it up. About 86% of plastic bottles go into the landfills or the ocean. Only 14% are recycled. Here’s a link to a slideshow about this enormous Great Pacific Garbage Patch:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/11/09/science/11102009_Garbage_index.html

And there is a Web site, http://www.greatgarbagepatch.org/ where you can learn more this ocean garbage patch and also about ways to make people aware of how to stop producing so much garbage by throwing away so many plastic bottles.

We also learned about the water that gets sold in plastic bottles and how companies get it. Usually companies go into small towns that can’t afford to or aren’t strong enough to push them out. Sometimes there will be many days when the water supply for the citizens runs out, while the water factories are still pumping water out of the ground. Then, they bottle it up, which takes a lot of energy, and ship it to stores, which also requires energy, and then they sell it.

The main problem of bottled water, though, is the water itself. The people who spoke to us said that the bottles send chemicals into the water when you leave water in the bottle too long or when you reuse the bottles. Also, we were told that only one person checks the clean-ness of these companies’ water; she has other jobs, too, which means that her mind isn’t even fully into the job. As for tap water from your homes, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – along with local water departments, like ours in Cambridge, MA – oversees keeping the public water supply healthy. If the Food and Drug Administration – the government agency that checks bottled water – finds anything in this water, the company of the dirty water just has to slip it off the shelf. They don't have to tell anyone. Also, any plastic that goes into the ocean can be eaten by fish, then we catch the fish, and we eat the fish along with any plastic that is in the fish.

Of course, I am just reporting what we were told in this workshop. We should do our own research and see what we find out about the business of putting water into plastic bottles. To learn more about the bottled water, you can go to www.empowerbrown.org/blog/ to find out what students at Brown University are doing to try to help the environment on their campus by trying to get students there to stop drinking water out of plastic bottles. Or you can go to dropofhopenews.blogspot.com for information and news about water, especially bottled water.

Even if you don't have time to do any research, you can at least go out and buy a reusable water bottle. They might be expensive to buy, but in the long run using one will save you money and your health.

Toward the end of the day the Sprouts (except for Maya, who went to a workshop about the treatment of greyhounds) went to a panel where Lilly and Kaya talked about things we are doing to try to help people save energy and help the earth. And we learned from others who talked about projects like working to make the roof of their school building green and going to the statehouse to meet with legislators about global warming.

Watch and listen on YouTube to Lilly and Kaya talk about some of the Sprouts’ energy-saving projects.

http://www.youtube.com/user/sproutsoh7#p/a/u/0/Jujz2WFELnQ

It was a very inspiring day for all of us who were at the Youth Summit.

And remember, think outside the bottle!!

Sprouts of Hope: Kids and Environmental Issues

Telling Others About What We Do

By Lilly

My Uncle Ben teaches a college class at Lesley University about teaching. In mid-November, he asked me to come speak about the environmental activities I have participated in throughout my life so his students could learn about how kids get involved with environmental issues. This was not a Sprouts of Hope event, but many of the things I talked about had to do with the Sprouts.

While a lot of what the Sprouts do is related to the environment, sometimes we do projects that help other people -- like when we went to a Mission Hill School as part of a Roots & Shoots service project on Martin Luther King, Jr. day earlier this year. There we spent time cleaning a classroom, as you can see in this photo.

At Lesley, my uncle's class was small, but the students had lots of questions. They wanted to know how I got interested in doing these kinds of activities and hear about the recent projects I have done, and many other things. I told them about our Kill-A-Watt project -- which is a book the Sprouts are creating to help kids and their parents use a Kill-A-Watt meter to find out how to save energy in their homes. We are planning on putting our book and a Kill-A-Watt meter together in packets and donating them to the Cambridge Public Library. Then, families can borrow this kit just like they borrow books.

You can see some of the drawings we are thinking about using on this book's cover.

I also told this class about the 2nd grade Roots & Shoots group we are helping at another Cambridge public school. And I let them know about how the Sprouts were involved with getting the composting program started at our school. And we are trying to get other schools in Cambridge interested in doing composting in their cafeterias.

I came away from this event realizing how much we have all done in the past few years! It made me feel really good about myself and our group and all the work we have done.

Sprouts of Hope: Keeping A River Healthy

Cleaning Up Along the Mystic River

By Maya

On Sunday, October 4th, two members of the Sprouts of Hope – me and Eliza – participated in the Roots & Shoots’ Mystic River clean up. Cambridge, the city where we live, is part of the the river's watershed, so it was fun to be doing something that helps the river and our community.

When we started, Beth Meserve, who works with MyRWA (the Mystic River Watershed Association) told us about efforts to keep the river clean and then showed us how she tests the water for various things. In one test, we used PH strips to find out the acidity of the river’s water. We did other tests on water samples to learn about the levels of nutrients and bacteria in the water. She also told us about how volunteers have been collecting water samples every month at 15 locations along the Mystic River -- and testing them -- since 2000. (You can learn more about how MyRWA keeps the river healthy at http://www.mysticriver.org/criver.org/.)

Watch and listen -- on YouTube -- as Beth tells us about taking care of the river and Eliza and I do some tests.

http://www.youtube.com/user/sproutsoh7#p/a/u/0/ZpxXMmdN5KQ

The water turned out to be pretty clean and healthy, but there was still a lot of trash in and around the river -- and that was what we wanted to clean up. When trash falls into the river, it contributes to make the river less healthy.

We put on boots and gloves grabbed some trash bags and headed of to start the clean up. We found a lot of trash on the streets and parks, so we ended up cleaning more than just the river.

There were bottles, paper, cigarettes, glass, empty bags of chips, toys, wrappers, straws, cans, and even a tire stuck in the ground. One person found a bike at the bottom of the river. When the clean-up was over, we had so many trash bags filled with trash. We ate donuts and muffins until all the clean-up groups returned.

Then each of us wrote a sentence on a strip of paper about why we were here or what the river means to us. Eliza wrote: "I came because rivers are important." And I wrote that "I hope this river will always be clean." We did this activity so we could help the river and so others could learn about why the Mystic River is so special and why it should be kept clean.

Some people in the neighborhood thanked us for cleaning up their river, and if felt good to help. I hope that the Sprouts can do another river clean up sometime.

Sprouts of Hope Share Lessons About Composting

Celebrating School Gardens, Talking about Compost

By Risa

On Saturday, October 3rd, the Sprouts of Hope participated in the City Sprouts School Garden Celebration. The event was a little slow starting because it was raining so hard, and all of the exhibits had to be set up inside instead of outside as we’d hoped. Once the celebration got going, it was a lot fun.

We were asked to represent our school, King Open, which last year became the first school in Cambridge to do school-wide composting in the cafeteria as a part of the Department of Public Works’ Food to Flowers program. So we designed activities for kids that would educate them about composting, in general and at our school.

One activity gave kids the chance to sort what can and can't be composted. We had three colored baskets, and each of us had drawn two things – either food or utensils or other things related to eating – and we’d laminated them so kids could decide which basket to put them in. The baskets were labeled as what can be composted at home, what can be composted at school, and what can't be composted. The point of the activity was to help the kids understand what can be composted in different situations.

We also created a big bubble-lettered page for kids to color. It said:

We want composting at our school.

We're hoping they take these colorful posters to their schools and put them on the walls so that everyone there starts thinking about wanting to have composting happen at their school. The kids really enjoyed coloring, and they – and their parents – seemed enthusiastic about the idea of composting.

Dr. Jeffrey Young, who is the Superintendent of the Cambridge Public Schools, stopped by at our table. We sent him an invitation so we were really glad he decided to come. Since he’s in his first year in Cambridge, we told him in our invitation about how the Sprouts of Hope had testified at the school committee about replacing polystyrene trays because they are bad for the environment. And we let him know how talking about the trays then led to our school, King Open, becoming the pilot program for composting in school cafeterias in Cambridge. He seemed to like the idea of composting at schools in Cambridge and was glad to hear that we were making it work so well in King Open.

At one point Fred Fantini, who is a member of the Cambridge School Committee and one of the people who supports our effort to make the school cafeterias more eco-friendly, stopped by to our table. And some of the Sprouts had their picture taken with him and with Christine Ellersick, who works at the New England Roots & Shoots organization and is always ready to help us.

We also showed the kids and parents who came to visit our table where the food waste from our school's cafeteria goes to be turned into compost.

Even though it rained and we had to be inside, the City Sprouts celebration was lots of fun and we hope we convinced a lot of kids – and parents – in Cambridge to want to start doing composting at their school. For kids at King Open, it’s now just part of what we do. And that’s cool because we’re helping the earth by using our food waste to make really good soil with the things we might otherwise throw away.

Compost: From Our School Cafeteria to the Farm

Seeing How Composting Works -- Up Close and Personal

By Eliza

On a weekday afternoon in September, the Sprouts of Hope went on an exciting but smelly field trip. We travelled by car to visit the compost farm where our school's food waste goes after we sort it into barrels in our cafeteria. Meryl Brott, who works in recycling at the Department of Public Works in Cambridge and helped us get our composting program going at King Open, arranged our visit and came with us to the farm.

The compost farm is located in Hamilton, Massachusetts, which is northeast of Cambridge, and it has been running for more than 20 years. The farmer, Nate, was kind enough to give us a very detailed and informative tour of the compost farm.

Here is something new that we learned on our visit:

15 years ago, this compost farm produced 60 cubic yards of compost a year. Now, it produces 25,000 each year. We figured out that means that in 15 years there has been a 415.66 percent increase in how many cubic yards of compost are created per year!

At the farm, they use bulldozers to mix around the compost. They have a big workshop where they keep all of their diggers and materials. There are huge piles of compost outside, but there are also huge buildings filled with indoor compost. One building was entirely filled with a kind of compost called “enhanced loam,” which is a compost/topsoil mix used to grow grass. Its quality is so high that it costs $30 per cubic yard, which is really expensive! Another type of compost that the farm makes is a mixture good for gardening that they call Sweet Peet. Sweet Peet is a composted, aged horse manure similar to mulch.

We drove out in the farmer’s truck to the back part of the farm where a lot of the composting takes place. Most of the compost piles are set in windrows, which are long rows of compost that provide more air and oxygen so that the composting happens faster and the piles are less likely to catch on fire.

Nate carried a huge and very long thermometer with him and every once in a while he’d stick it in one of the piles and show us the heat being generated from the compost pile. Often the thermometer would tell us that on the inside of the pile the temperature was pretty high. [This photo shows the thermometer when it first was put into the pile, and then we'd watch the needle move as the temperature got hotter.] It’s the heat and energy generated by the composting that helps to move the process along. Sometimes we'd see steam coming out of the piles.

The compost farm staff constantly use big machines and diggers to flip the windrows. There are four or five of them next to each other, with space in between to make the flipping easier. These piles take four to five months to fully turn into nutrient rich dirt. Once the compost makes it through its last windrow, it goes into this huge green machine that does the final processing. From there, it heads up, up, up, until it gets tossed out on to the top of the pile that is the final product.

We also found some items -- a plastic shoe and a noncompostable fork -- that should not have been put into the compost stream in the first place.

The most important thing we learned, though, is how important it is to compost whatever can be composted. Before the trip, we didn't know that it costs half as much money in the long run to compost food and yard waste than to send this waste to a landfill where they will rot the “wrong” way. People are paying a lot of money to throw food and yard waste (since these are the two largest types of waste that could be composted) into landfills when they could be saving nearly twice as much money by composting them. This would turn their waste into something useful, produce really good dirt that others can use to grow things, and help to save the earth.