Purpose: To raise awareness and involve the audience through an artistic expression of why going green is important and desirable.

Description: This concert/performance of mostly original songs and stories about climate change is designed to inspire action, cooperation, and emotional responses to environmental concerns for our communities, and assert the collective power of individuals in addressing issues affecting our climate and our environment. Music performed on instruments made from natural materials. This performance is powered by a home-made portable solar generator.
Grade level: K-8

Purpose: To work together in finding practical every day solutions to climate change that students can apply immediately at home and school.

Description: During this hands on workshop students will explore what they can commit to do at home and in school to save energy, water and environmental impact on a very low budget. Activities will range from monitoring and changing electrical use patterns, eating habits, and recycling, to conserving water and planting trees.
Grade level: K-12

Purpose: To involve students in a first-hand experience of how solar heat works, how it can be captured, and how it can be used to cook our food.

Description: After a brief demonstration, students will brake into subgroups to make a solar over from cardboard and other natural, easy to find, materials. After they make their ovens they will be given a vegetable to cook in it on the next sunny day, and will be asked to talk about and write what they experienced while learning about solar energy, making a solar oven, and cooking in it. Follow-up activities include creating their own solar recipes and writing a cookbook.
Grade Level: 5th to 12

 
Green Living Residency:

“Imagine a Greener Future: 
Designing an Eco-Village”

           

Purpose: To involve the students in designing their own village taking into account basic ecological principles, and other basic needs of their community.

Description: Over a minimum of five days, students will be presented with a miniature three-dimensional model of the ecovillage the artists created themselves. A Walk through the village will point out elements of design that take into consideration aspects of  social, environmental and economic features, including rain-water capture and distribution, water recycling, organic gardening, natural buildings, forest conservation, natural threats, decision making, conflict resolution, and mental models of cooperation needed to live in a sustainable village. At the end of the residency students will use an artistic medium to design their own village and present/exhibit it to the rest of the school.
Grade level: 5-12

Teachers Sustainability In-Service:

“Green on Blue:  Sustainability and the Curriculum Blueprint”

                   

Purpose: To aquire green tools and lesson plans that can be integrated into the existing curriculum and school culture across the board, helping teachers develop new skills in teaching for sustainability.

Description: Participants will explore in depth the rapidly emerging “going green” paradigm and the types of changes that must occur in order to support the “cool” shift in our schools. This program will integrate rich literature from both anthropology and sociology regarding the cultural web of life as a way to imbed arts and culture in the core content of the curriculum. By focusing on the cultural fabric that envelopes our schools, participants will examine the relationship of local heritage and place, the link between declining natural systems, the biosphere, and vanishing local cultures, and the use of oral history and storytelling as a methodology in the classroom and as arts and culture integration in the curriculum. It will offer participants a better understanding of cultural progress, urban development, immigration and globalization and ways of capturing the heritage and community memory of people who live in place.
Audience: Teachers and Administrators