In honor of Earth Day, our Pinole Valley EarthTeam interns dedicated a whole week to educate students about our local creek and environment. Each day, our interns hosted several different events and activities in the library with the purpose of engaging the students of Pinole Valley High towards becoming more aware of their surrounding environment. Our activities ranged from hosting an informational booth about our local creek to a competitive Jeopardy game with questions created by our EarthTeam interns. To engage many of the students, a few activities came with an incentive for the winner. For example, using cigarette butts found near Pinole Creek, a competition was created to see which student could guess how many cigarette butts were in a jar and in return, the winner would receive a gift card.
One of the most popular and competitive activities during Pinole Valley’s Earth Week was Jeopardy. Our interns were able to gather many students to form into teams of four to play for a chance at winning four Chipotle gift cards.
The game was very intense as it came down to the last question to determine the winner. Although only four students left with the gift cards, all of the students who participated left with more knowledge than they came in with, which was the main purpose of the game.
With only a couple of days to prepare for Earth Week, our interns were able to pull the week-long event together with much success. Giving up their lunch hour every day of Earth Week in order to facilitate these activities showed how much our determined interns were invested and in return, positive feedback was received as many of the students were involved and engaged in the activities presented. They were accomplished to see students coming together to learn about our local environment and to compete against each other. This event could not have been possible without the support of our librarian, Ms. carlyle, and our principal, Mr. Kibby, as he advertised Earth Week through the morning announcements every single day leading up to the final Jeopardy event on Friday. In addition, our librarian pitched many ideas for the activities as well as let our EarthTeam occupy the library throughout the week. Earth Week has not only brought the interns together, but also the students and faculty of Pinole Valley in support of spreading knowledge of the local environment across campus.