To celebrate Earth Day, the Hackley Earth Action League (HEAL) announced that the week of April 18 to April 22 would be coined “Earth Week.” Throughout this week, HEAL organized various activities to help honor the Earth as well as to spread awareness of the importance of preserving it.
Throughout the week, HEAL organized many different events targeted at different people and different activities. One of these was a guided nature walk featuring guest speaker Vladimir Klimenko, a Hackley US history teacher. Also, visual arts teacher Sarah Cobles’ 3D design class helped paint “Bee Boxes” that will house the bees in the new apiary. Each morning HEAL sent videos to all the advisors to show to their homerooms, informing students about different ways to be environmentally conscientious.
On Wednesday, April 27th, during school-wide community time, each homeroom participated in an environment-themed Kahoot, including fun trivia about our planet. The Kahoot included trivia about composting, national parks services, waste, and recycling. In addition, Tessa Johnson, a Hackley science teacher, and Glenn Hasslinger, a health/PE teacher, organized a video informing the Hackley students and teachers about the new apiary. The Advanced Forest Ecology Research (AFER) class also created a video that included intriguing information about the features of the apiary.
For day four of Earth Week, students were encouraged to use reusable water bottles. If you showed your water bottle to a HEAL member, you would receive a prize of stickers and candy. This helped convey the message that there is no need to accumulate more plastic waste by using plastic water bottles when you can use reusable ones.
On Earth Day itself, HEAL scheduled a campus-wide cleanup for students to participate in throughout the day, with the grade collecting the most trash being promised a prize. On Saturday, the Hackley Lake Keepers collaborated with the town of Tarrytown and scheduled a Tarrytown Lakes clean-up. Another offering given by HEAL was a tree planting event where students could go and plant seeds to take home, see birds of prey demonstration and learn about biodiversity.