By Bob Siris
12/9/10
When it comes to “going green,” we’ve all heard the expression “Think globally, act locally.”

Melanie Siris, a fifth-grader at St. Agatha School, decided to take this advice to heart and formed her own local “go green” organization. At the end of the summer, she sent around a flyer to neighborhood parents outlining a five-week agenda for a group she called the “Green Club.” The purpose of the club is to help younger kids in the neighborhood gain a better understanding about the importance of protecting the environment by doing hands-on projects and playing what Melanie called “green games.”

The group is meeting every Sunday afternoon for five weeks and works on a variety of green projects. The first week, Melanie taught the group about plants. They painted flower pots and planted flower seeds in them. The next week they learned about the importance of recycling. Melanie gave them a good understanding about what you can and can’t put in the recycle bin and why it is so important to recycle. She led the group on a tour around the neighborhood, where they picked up plastic bottles, aluminum cans and other litter. The recyclables went in a blue bin, and the trash went into a trash bag.

Last week, Melanie taught the group about conserving electricity, showing them the energy savings between new CFL light bulbs over conventional bulbs. There was also a demonstration that taught the value of saving water.

“A few weeks ago, we put a new water-saving showerhead in one of our bathrooms,” Melanie said. “Our other bathroom has an old showerhead. We ran a test on each shower, turning on the water at the usual setting for 10 seconds. It was cool to see how much less water we waste with the new water-saving showerhead over the old one…almost half the water.”

At the end of each weekly session, Melanie hands out a “go green” puzzle game of some kind that she makes herself. Maybe it’s a maze where a plastic bottle starts at one end and tries to find its way to the recycle bin; or a word-search puzzle, where hidden words like conservation, reduce, reuse and recycle have to be found.

So what prompted her to form the Green Club? Her family recently took a vacation in California, where they stayed in a condominium complex that had no recycling program.