Earth Day 2010

I felt it was important to get my Inglés en Movimiento students thinking about how they take care of the Earth on the occasion of Earth Day which was April 22nd. I taught them a short dance that celebrates Earth. One of the movements involves imagining you are holding the Earth in your hand and another move is sending love from your heart into the world. We practiced English vocabulary for parts of the body, directions and the movements themselves. I asked each student to think of how they take care of the Earth, then passed around a little ball that had an Earth design on it. When they had the ball, they shared how they take care of the Earth in Catalan, then I'd repeat it in English.

The children I work with are 4 to 7 year olds. The "older" kids talked about recycling, using organic trash and manure for helping plants and trees grow, the importance of plants and trees, not wasting paper or pencils and taking good care of their toys so they last a long time. The strangest comment came from a 5 year old who mentioned "not breaking into other people's homes and stealing things"--I didn't have time to ask what inspired that answer.

Most of the 4 year olds were challenged by the concept of Earth being the planet where we live, but understood it as the ground under our feet. Also, in an effort to help them properly pronounce "Earth" in English we also practiced the "th" sound, because they don't use it much in Catalan. I had the children draw Earth on a piece of paper and on the other side they drew themselves taking care of it--a few of their drawings are shown here.

April 22 is Earth Day and here in Catalunya, where I live, St. Jordi, the patron saint of Catalunya is honored on April 23rd. It is "The Day of the Lovers" and later became "The Day of the Book and the Rose." A bookseller came up with the idea as the day also commemorates the day that both Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare died. The tradition is that women buy a book for men and men buy women a rose. In the legend of "St. George and the Dragon," St. George kills the dragon to save the princess. This legend can represent the patriarchal culture conquering the Earth (the dragon is a symbol of the natural world) and the matriarchal societies who worked with the Earth, moving civilization into a model where power is exerted over the Earth. Looked at in this light, it's almost the opposite of Earth Day.