Image: The Gaia Project.
The Gaia Project has adapted its award-winning school programming, which empowers children to take action on climate change, into online resources and daily climate activities for elementary and middle-school students during the COVID-19 crisis.
“Right around the time when schools got canceled we realized that our regular programming, which happens usually in the classroom with students and teachers, was going to have to shift because we couldn’t be gathering in groups anymore, said Gaia Project Program Delivery Officer Jane Burchill.
Jimmy Therrien leading the Trash Tracker program. Image: submitted.
The New Brunswick-based non-profit organization has been working in New Brunswick schools for more than 10 years, running five programs across different grade levels incorporating inquiry-based education, curriculum links and local action related to climate change.
“We designed the Gaia Climate Quest to still reach our audience, but through online resources for students that are at home and for parents also who are at home, and looking for kind of simple, simple quick and easy, but also educational activities for their children,” she said.
Climate Quest provides daily at-home activities, including experiments, crafts, mini-challenges and a weekly climate story-time. The Gaia team produces instructional videos and kid-appropriate downloadable guides and worksheets to keep activities on-track and easy for parents. People can sign up for the program on The Gaia Project’s website.
Every day of the week has a theme:
- Meals Mondays,
- Turn It Off Tuesdays
- Wilderness Wednesdays
- Trash Thursdays
- Fridays for Future
“It’s been an adjustment, but our team has definitely stepped up to the challenge and I think everyone has been, you know, having a great time, kind of using the creative parts of their brain which maybe sometimes we don’t get to use as often,” said Burchill.
Since its launch on April 9, 650 parents have subscribed to the daily emails; 400 are English-language subscribers while 250 are French-language subscribers.
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- Trash Tuesday craft – pop bottle piggy bank video tutorial (Image: The Gaia Project)
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- This week’s Wilderness Wednesday activity was to build a rain gauge exploring science and math topics (Image: The Gaia Project)
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- Participant in Fridays for Future Challenge! [David Branch, Grade 3] (Image: The Gaia Project)
All of Climate Quest’s content is available on its Gaia’s social media and students encouraged to share their artwork, experiments and their creative climate homework with the Gaia Climate Quest community.
NB Power and The McCain Foundation, regular sponsors of The Gaia Project, has given funding to run the Climate Quest program for five weeks.
“We are incredibly grateful that two of our supporters allowed us to reallocate funds towards this initiative,” said executive director Lizzy Gresh. “It allowed us to respond to the situation and continue moving forward our mission despite school closures.”
The response thus far has been strong and positive from both parents and teachers. Teachers, in particular, are reaching out to Gaia to supplement their learning resources for kids.
“A lot of them are teaching from distance, they’ve been using our resources with their students,” said Burchill. “This week a teacher reached out to me and said that they would love to do some vermicomposting [composting with worms] with their students from distance, so I’m actually going to go drop [material to him] this week so he can start doing experiments with his students.”
This story was originally published on Huddle.Today – an Acadia Broadcasting Limited content partner.
