Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
The EPA has a number of excellent tools on its website that give access to a lot of environmental information. The Surf Your Watershed pages are particularly nice because they have specific links to citizen-based groups working in your watershed. Ours is the Lower Missouri Watershed, and the groups working there include schools, groups concerned about fish, and land trusts.
The site also links to the USGS streamflow data and some of their scientific research done in the area.
Following the theme of philanthropy, if you use Twitter you can help save the Galvao birds of Brazil. More information about this fascinating project can be found at On The Media.
The above video, on how to build a self-watering container (this type is also known as a Global Buckets), seems extremely useful for the urban gardener, especially in Memphis where even gardening in the ground is difficult because of the poor, loessic soil. I’ve found container gardening (in cat litter buckets) to be much more effective, even though evaporation is a major issue with our hot summers. So I very much like the idea of self-watering containers.
These containers may also be an excellent complement to our greenhouse, because we can avoid having to water every day. If we got the right containers, or decorated them nicely enough, we might be able to sell these with our vegetables at the end-of-year plant sale.
The related videos on YouTube have a variety of other self-watering container variants. This version, with water jugs and a single large tub, also seems like it might be effective. There are also nice instructional video on how siphons work, as an easier way of watering a series of buckets. The Global Buckets project is a fascinating effort to help reduce malnutrition with simple materials.
This blog is my experiment with how my own small and everyday choices for peace impact my life and others. – Peggy Pate-Smith (2010) in “Peace is a choice”
Everyday choices often have a far-reaching impact because we live in a world that’s so interconnected. I tend to think in terms of the environmental impact of my actions: Do I buy this pair of shoes that may have been made by child labor in China? If I get a new, better cell phone will the old one be recycled properly or will it shipped off to some developing country where its corrosion will contaminate the water supply?
Peggy Pate-Smith from Park View Montessori‘s Middle School in Jackson, TN has been thinking about peace. Her blog, appropriately titled Peace is a Choice, logs her thoughts on small and big matters regarding peace. I’ve found it a great place to find out about peace projects, many with a Montessori link, in which students might be interested in participating.
This year I decided to do an experiment with peace. My hypothesis is that if each day I make at least one conscious decision to choose peace in my life AND blog about it that I will find my life more peaceful. I want to move beyond imagining peace and make a deliberate effort to choose peace. Peggy Pate-Smith (2010) in “Peace is a Choice”.
Ms. Pate-Smith’s master’s thesis, “Implications of Peace in the Montessori Environment” won American Montessori Society’s 2007 Outstanding Master’s Thesis Award.