Aiken Elementary is a certified South Carolina Green Steps school and the ✨2024 Overall School of the Year✨ and ✨2022 Restore School of the Year!✨ Each year, we work on at least six projects that focus on conserving, protecting, and restoring our environment. In each project, students work with our community partners and mentors to "learn, do and teach" their classmates, families, and community about sustainable living. Please check out the projects below to learn about the wonderful things happening at Aiken Elementary! We have been VERY busy! 💚🌎♻️
We are busy learning how to live sustainably at Aiken Elementary, so please check out some of our great projects below! We'll keep our projects from last year up as we engage in this year's planned projects, then post updates as we learn and grow!
🌲Project #1: Restoring our Outdoor Classroom (2023-2024)💚
👩🏽🌾Dig in the Dirt Days (2023-2024)🌱
Our Dig in the Dirt Days are some of the best of our year! Weather wasn't a problem this year, so every job was done! We even had some of our former AES alumni take a break from the middle school to join us with their families! 💙💚
And the best part? Class after class taking their learning outside! 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽 We love our outdoor classroom at AES! 😍
📦Project #2: Reused and Upcycled Materials Art (2023-2024)📦
Students at Aiken Elementary have many opportunities to get creative with upcycled materials-in the classroom, art room, Makerspace, and at home! This year, we created upcycled art through 3 big projects:
- Our third annual 🍁Upcycled Scarecrow Parade👨🌾, where students built scarecrows using only items recyclable by Aiken County
- Our second annual 👒Upcycled Fashion Show📸 to celebrate Earth Week and our school's Earth Fair where we share our Green Steps projects with our community
- An 🎨upcycled sculpture🎨 inspired by artist Dale Chihuly that our art students created as a community!
We learned that there are A LOT of things we could reuse for another purpose or recycle to keep out of landfills! ♻️
💧Project #3: Rain Water Collection (2023-2024)🌻
We love collecting rainwater in our rain barrels donated by Aiken Soil and Water and put together by Mrs. Osborne's 1st graders and father! This year, we decided to repeat our rainwater collection experiment and plant sunflowers as a legacy project for kindergarten! This years kindergartners planted their gardens for next years kindergartners as a welcome to a new year! We thought we should ask our whole school to get involved by helping us with our experiment again to see if we could figure out an answer to our question: which will help sunflowers grow best-rain water or tap water? 🌻💧
When the school year ended, our sunflowers were just starting growing! So...which will grow best-rain water or tap water? Check back to see! 🌻
🍎Project #4: Composting Areas (2023-2024)🪱
Aiken Elementary has many compost areas! We have 2 tumbler composters on our playgrounds and vermicompost bins, too!
This year, our kindergarten decided to explore our vermicompost bins! We started our project with an amazing inquiry question because our bins had a problem!
We asked: What happened to our worms?🪱
We kept working with our tumbler composters, too! We reminded our students what could go in...
...then we turned, turned, turned!
We'll keep taking care of our worms and compost bins so we can use compost to help make our gardens healthy! Check out our gardens next year! We'll use some of our compost to see how it helps our gardens grow! 🌻
🗑Project #5: Outdoor Classroom and Campus Clean Up Days (2023-2024)🗑
For three weeks, the first graders in Mrs. Osborne's and Mrs. Keck's classes became our "AES Litter Pick Up Crew" and picked up litter in our outdoor classroom! They counted the total pieces of litter they collected, listed the kinds of litter they collected, and compared their clean ups over time. Then, they shared their findings each week on our morning Newsflash! These awesome first graders taught our school how important it is to clean up after ourselves and others in order to keep our outdoor classroom safe and clean for our animal friends and our own learning and playing! Here is the data they collected:
We learned a lot from our litter prevention project! Our first graders taught us 3 important lessons:
📌When our school plans a fun project, like our Bird Tree Project, we need to clean up afterwards!
📌If we clean up regularly, the amount of litter in our outdoor classroom decreases over time.
📌A little help goes a long way! Imagine if all of our classrooms chipped in and cleaned up!
A special thank you to Mrs. Osborne's and Mrs. Keck's "Litter Pick Up Crew" for working so hard on this project! 💚🙌🏽🌳
♻️Project #6 Plastic Recycling (2023-2024)♻️
We continued our recycling project this year by recycling plastic bags through the Trex challenge! Through this challenge, each pound of plastic bags we recycle at our local grocery stores adds up! The school with the most pounds recycled wins a new Trex bench for their school! What a great way to show students how recycling plastic is SO much better than sending it to a landfill!
Last year, WE WON! Here's a picture of the beautiful bench from Trex!🏆🙌🏾
This year, our cycle ends in October of 2024-so we are STILL collecting!!!
Save your bags!!!
💦Project #7: Erosion Control (2023-2024)💨
We are so grateful to our friends at Aiken Soil and Water for helping us with this project! We are working on an erosion plan for our outdoor classroom and our 4th graders are taking the lead!
Check back with us in August to see how our new grass is working to help solve our erosion problem! 🙌🏽
✨Project #8: Maverick Miracle Cleaner (2023-2024)✨
You may be wondering how we fund these awesome projects! We rely heavily on donations and grants, so we started something to help us along the way!
✨MAVERICK MIRACLE CLEANER✨
Our entire school helps make this amazing cleaner, which is tried and true tested by lots of teachers and parents! We added fresh rosemary to our recipe and we LOVE it!
Interested in supporting us? We would appreciate it more than you know!💚🌎♻️
Thank you for visiting our site to learn more about the ways we are learning to conserve, protect and restore our environment through the South Carolina Green Steps program! Please check back to see how we continue to learn about sustainable living at Aiken Elementary!