We’ve spent ten weeks exploring the climate crisis through the lens of the food system and ended with a celebration of healthy soil, the most important resource we must figure out how to protect! In the classroom, the fourth and fifth graders watched a short film from the Center for Food Safety narrated by Michael Pollan called Soil Solutions to Climate Problems. We revisited the idea that carbon captured in the soil leads to healthier plants and that carbon released into the atmosphere warms the planet.
In the kitchen, we made edible “soil” cups with chocolate chia pudding, chocolate cookie dirt, pomegranate rocks, and candied citrus peel worms topped with edible flowers. It was a sweet way to end the unit in all respects.
Room 202 paired the activity with a field trip to the Recology transfer station. We played several games designed to help us learn what items get sorted into what bins and the difference between what happens to a milk carton when we throw it into the black bin (headed to landfill) versus the blue bin (recycled to make more milk cartons). Students got to meet a couple of artists in residence who are using things they find at “the dump” for inspiration. Then they braved the smell of the huge pit where the contents of San Francisco’s black bins are collected before being taken to the landfill and the area where all of San Francisco’s green waste is combined before being taken to be made into compost that then goes back into farmland to make… healthy soil!
