Congratulations to students, teachers and staffers at George R. Staley Upper Elementary school on Rome New York for taking the lead in promoting green initiatives in their community.

This week, the school hosted its first-ever Community Go-Green Night. The event featured displays, discussions and demonstrations about earth-friendly practices that everyone can do at home and in the workplace.

Collection stations were also set up to accept unwanted household items, such as batteries, used Christmas lights, electronics and more.

City officials and solid-waste authorities were also on hand to answer questions.

“It’s our goal to teach our children to sustain our earth for generations to come. It’s our duty,” said Karen Miller school principal.

Editor’s Note: Earlier this fall, our blogger, Jessica Anderson, a kindergarten teacher in Ann Arbor, MI, wrote about the beginnings of her school’s pumpkin patch. Today, she writes about how the pumpkin patch provides learning opportunities for her young students.

Pumpkins were the stars of the Halloween show this year in our kindergarten class. We spent the last week of October cutting, scooping, weighing, measuring, counting, and recording what we learned about the pumpkins from our patch.

A few stats:

• Our lightest pumpkin weighed 50 pounds, the heaviest, 94 pounds!
• None of our five giant pumpkins had fewer than 300 seeds.
• Each pumpkin had at least 13 ribs.
• Pumpkins float!

Counting seeds.

We used the seeds at our Estimation Station, comparing a cup of 10 seeds and guessing how many seeds were in the “Mystery Cup.” Parents came in to help kids count out sets of 10 seeds at a time, and put them in the sections of egg cartons. Then the parents helped kids count by tens to find the total. We had to scoop out the insides of the pumpkins before we could even lift them onto the scale! Kids worked in table groups to discover each fact and recorded them on our class Pumpkin Observation Poster, which I’d adapted from one I saw in a catalog. I made five other versions of this poster, laminated to write on/ wipe off, and use again next year, for our Pre-School reading buddies (with blank spots instead of the questions we included, so they could write their own — just right for the littler kids.

Instead of “How many seeds,” they could write in, “How many colors can you count on the pumpkin?”).  I gave away the other posters to K-2 colleagues so everyone could share in the pumpkin fun.

Since sharing is always part of the fun, we carved up our biggest pumpkin with the Thurston Mascot, a Great Blue Heron, and the words, “Thurston Rocks!” as a gift for our new principal, the lovely and talented Natasha York. The kids wheeled it down on a big cart at the end of the day on Thursday to present to her, to everyone’s delight! We also shared the other pumpkins, raffling them off at our PTO’s annual Fall Carnival. As the kindergarten’s gift, we split the proceeds with PTO. Our pumpkin patch has a nice little sum to start next year’s planting season with, and PTO benefited, too!

We did not, however share those hundreds of seeds…we roasted and gobbled up as many as we could eat, all agreeing they were much better than the store-bought kind. What we couldn’t eat, we are saving to plant in next year’s pumpkin patch, and just looking at the jar of sparkling white seeds is making us dream of spring.