Daycare’s Going Green
Discuss with your group: Helping childcare centers go organic and become more environmentally friendly. From KIWI’s August/September 2010 issue.
More than 11 million children under age 5 in this country go to daycare or preschool. Are they getting the healthy environment they deserve? KIWI writer Lora Shinn caught up with five daycares that are leading the way to a new era of greener early education. Here’s what one center is doing:
Sprouts, in Norcross, Georgia is a leader in teaching eco lessons. Kids are never too little to learn to appreciate the environment, Sprouts’ founders believe. But raising eco-minded children isn’t about a lesson here and a field trip there: Eco principles must be integrated—gently!—into everyday activities.
So, at Sprouts, children might sing a song about butterflies, then craft butterflies from sustainable materials. They’ll discuss colors, habitat, and how butterflies can help the planet (pollination).
Other regular activities lend themselves to eco-fun lessons: Organic produce is delivered by local farms, and toddlers identify each item and help wash off the fruits and veggies. “If they’re not physically helping, then we’re talking to them about what we’re doing,” says Laura Laszlo, one of Sprouts’ founders. Toddlers and preschool-age kids “feed” leftovers to the compost bin’s worms. Each child manages a zone of the organic garden and gets to experience the entire food cycle. Kids even water their crops with captured rainwater.
Laszlo believes that eco-healthy childcare helps raise kids who will do more to protect the planet. “We’re changing the lifestyle of a complete generation, which may help undo the damage done by previous generations,” she says.
Learn about daycares who are serving organic meals, creating nontoxic play spaces, saving energy, and helping families make healthy choices by purchasing KIWI’s digital edition.
Talk About It
- Is your child’s daycare or preschool making efforts to be more sustainable? How? If not, what are some of the areas you think they could improve upon?
- Laszlo believes that eco-healthy childcare helps raise kids who will do more to protect the planet. If your child doesn’t attend a green daycare, what sorts of things can you do at home to help her be more eco-conscious?
- If your child’s daycare or preschool is eco-friendly, do you feel it has positively impacted your child’s level of eco-consciousness?
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This is a GREAT topic Kiwi. Kudos to you. I have worked with a couple of the foremost green daycares in the country as part of my business, The Green Mama LLC, and have found that it is a movement truly at its infancy but about to take off running! The Little Green Treehouse in Chicago, IL, was my first client. They are a relatively large daycare and they saw green as both the right thing to do and as the trend of the future. As with any green daycare, they paid very close attention to improving their indoor air quality, sourcing organic food, and having healthy toys, furniture, plates/utensils, etc. What I was thrilled about, however, is that they also chose to do cloth diapers. This saved the parents attending approximately $50/week and helped ensure the little ones in their care got the health benefits of cloth–they also kept two semi truck loads of diapers out of the landfill in their first year of operation. Wow! On follow-up, they said this decision was the one that they were finding EASIEST to maintain.
You can learn more about The Green Mama, including lots of tips for how parents and childcare providers can grow greener, at http://www.thegreenmama.com.
Thanks again.
manda aufochs gillespie
founder/president
the green mama, llc
m: 604–417-6888
general line: 773–299-8502
growing greener families
http://www.TheGreenMama.com
http://www.twitter.com/thegreenmama
http://www.facebook.com/TheGreenMamaLLC
http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/the-green-mama/