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Next year will mark the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, a time to celebrate the planet and call for better care of it by humans.
Horticulture students at Walkersville High School, where the program is comprised of "predominantly girls," according to horticulture teacher Sarah Welty, know what caring for the planet entails at a local level: Cultivating the growth of plants that remove carbon dioxide – a gas that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency now says contributes to climate change – from the atmosphere and replace it with oxygen.
"They tend to think that we're not really helping anything," said Walkersville High junior Kristianne Leibly, 16, last week.
That's partially why Kristianne and 16 of her classmates, along with Welty, travelled across Walkersville to Glade Elementary School for Earth Day April 22. They gave interactive planting lessons to Glade first-graders, who will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day when they reach high school.
The first-graders took lessons at four stations, spending about 20 minutes at each. Lisa Aberts' first-graders filed out to the playground and sat in a row before a group of Welty's horticulture students.
"Are you guys ready to get your hands dirty?" Kristianne asked the children. Her voice soared with enthusiasm, and the young students responded with one resonating "Yeah!"
After an interactive food chain demonstration, Aberts instructed her students — in song — to form a circle so that the high school students could teach them how to grow grass seeds in terrariums.
Colby Ruffner, 7, held his bag of composting material — potting soil, wet grass clippings, broccoli and newspaper pieces he'd shredded himself. When asked why he had the materials in the plastic baggie, Colby answered, "Because, to make newspaper turn into dirt."
The compost was for the first-graders to take home, Kristianne said.
"By the end of the year, they can put it in their garden," Kristianne said. "All of the broccoli and grass releases a lot of nitrogen, and it will make their plants or whatever they have in their garden grow much bigger."
The idea for the Earth Day lesson arose from a parent-teacher conference in March (Welty's son, Owen Welty, 7, is in Aberts' class). Having her students plan and teach Earth Day lessons to elementary students was a confidence-building exercise and made her students think on their feet.
"We need to teach kids as they're younger to plant plants, because as they get older, they don't want to plant them. They think it's sissy-like," Kristianne said. "That's what a lot of high school kids think, is that it's sissy-like to plant plants, but it's actually really fun to take care of them because at the end, you have this beautiful product."
A fast-moving spring rain interrupted the lessons and forced the students inside. At a station about dissecting soy seeds and planting watermelon seeds, students filed one-by-one to scoop up soil, plant their seeds and get them watered by a new group of high-school students.
First-graders Jack Hillman, Colby Ruffner, Owen Welty and Bailey Vann sat around a group of desks with their potted watermelon seeds.
"We're going to put sunlight in it," Colby said.
When asked what he would do when the seed became a watermelon, he answered, "I'll probably just eat mine."
E-mail Jeremy Hauck at jhauck@gazette.net.
