Teaching Stewardship

Last weekend my Girl Scouts (actually a Junior and a Brownie) took part in a stream cleanup for a creek that runs through our neighborhood. In all honesty, the kids view the stream clean up as a kind of treasure hunt as much as service project but that’s fine. What a great learning opportunity! Every piece of trash or treasure that was found can illicit a conversation about how it could be harmful to the environment.

My Junior Scout and her friends are old enough to know that something like a plastic bag can become a death trap for any number of animals that could find themselves wrapped in it. How about a set of tea cups that they found in the creek? To the scouts this is much more of a treasure and talking about how it may harm the environment is a bit more tricky. “An animal could try to eat it and hurt their teeth,” my Brownie says. True, but not very likely. Still, her answer is perfectly acceptable. What about the clothes rack that we found? A brother, of one scout, that he hit gold with that find. The clothes rack was a bit harder to find fault with. There were metal parts to it though and they were rusting. Could the rust be bad for the environment? Could the fish in the creek be harmed by the rust? Yes, of course, is the answer but I think those were two good questions that had my scouts wondering about our environment and how they can impact it by what they put into it.

The project ended as a success by all accounts and we walked up the street to our home. As we approached our yard I spied bits of paper left by the trash service, a blue plastic baseball bat and upon closer inspection bits of plastic from water balloons long since popped. On any given day my own yard can be an environment disaster. I asked my kids to do a quick walk through our yard to pick up any bits of trash they came across. We found broken whiffle balls, more torn up water balloons, plastic straw wrappers (I hate those things) and unidentified junk. All of it, we decided, was bad for our environment. Animals could hurt themselves, or worse, handling this trash. Little bits of plastic could get into our soil and poison the dirt. Great conclusions! I found the exercise of cleaning up our yard a great way for my kids to learn the value of keeping our environment trash free.