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By: Danny Woolums,
Environmental Educator

Working for Bluegrass Greensource is always full of surprises.

Sometimes I get to tour landfills or visit state parks as part of my work. And sometimes I’m working at 4am doing an audit of neighborhood recycling bins trying to beat the recycling trucks. Yep, the Live Green Lexington Recycle Challenge has officially kicked off and Arlington, Harrison, and William Wells Brown Elementary Schools are on their way success.

For anyone unfamiliar with the new program, the City of Lexington has been looking for innovative ways to increase recycling throughout their service area. After identifying key areas with the most room to improve, LFUCG developed a program to help three well-deserving schools each get $12,000 to use for their students. The goal: increasing the rate of recycling in each school district by 50%. LFUCG, working in tandem with Bluegrass Greensource and the STEM Lab teachers from each school, developed the Recycle Challenge curriculum to reach these important goals and secure some seriously great benefits for each participating school.

Recycle Challenge Kickoff:

The official kickoff event was at the Lyric Theater on October 4^th where acclaimed children’s education performer Billy B came and sang about environmental impacts. Our Outreach Specialists have been working with businesses in the area to do waste audits and connect them to the Challenge. Meanwhile, the STEM lab teachers are finding unique ways to incorporate recycling into their lessons such as making instruments out of recycled materials!

How to Get Involved

The students are getting involved beyond the classroom by doing community walks through their neighborhoods. Kindergarten through 5^th grade students marched through their community identifying who had a blue recycling bin, where there was litter, and sharing with passersby about why they thought recycling is important.

Beginning in January and ending the last day of March, LFUCG will begin recording data on how many more people in these three school districts are participating in the recycling program. If you live in the neighborhood or know someone that does, please remember to recycle! It’s great for the planet, but it also helps the schools and students in your backyard!

To learn more about how you can support these students and schools, including partnership opportunities, please visit: https://www.lexingtonky.gov/recycle-challenge

By: Chris Porter
Bluegrass Greensource
Development Director

At Bluegrass Greensource, we try to make all of our K-12 educational activities as tactile as possible. Fully engaging all of a student’s senses helps them grasp ideas and retain information, all while deepening their understanding of a given lesson.

Animal pelts and skulls are, by far, the most popular hands-on materials that we bring to the classroom and make available to teachers. These pelts and skulls supplement lessons on local wildlife and are used to help children understand animal biology, habitat and how it is affected by various factors, and animal adaptation to weather, climate, and changing seasons.

“Having hands-on materials like pelts and skulls is so important for enhancing student learning,” says Pattie Stivender, Bluegrass Greensource’s Education Director. “A teacher can describe the differences between the teeth of a carnivore and an herbivore. She can have students read a book or complete a worksheet. But when a student is able to touch and experience the different animal teeth first hand, you can see the moment on their face when they connect the dots and the concept comes to life. Nothing compares to that moment.”

The pelts and skulls that we have been using are 10-years old, and because of their popularity and near constant use, they had begun to fall apart. As part of our spring fundraising drive, we reached out to our friends and supporters to raise money to replace this resource. In addition, we applied for and received a grant from the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels. Thanks to the generosity of the Colonels and our supporters, we are excited to share that we have been able to replace all of our pelts and skulls.

These materials not only bolster our own efforts to provide high-quality environmental education, they also support individual teachers throughout Central Kentucky who access them through our Community Resource Library. “For an individual teacher, the cost of these materials can be a barrier, particularly for something that you won’t use every day,” says Pattie. “So having access to them through our library is such an important resource for the teachers we work with.”

Thank you to our wonderful supporters and to the many good people at the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels! Their generosity and investments ensure our ability to continue providing the first-rate environmental education that we need throughout Central Kentucky.