Carruthers Elementary: A Year of Conservation and Creativity
Students: 475
Staff: 6
Project type: Energy Conservation
Location: Murphysboro, IL
Grade levels: 3-5
Carruthers Elementary School won the Creative Use of Resources award for the 21-22 cohort of the Illinois Green Schools Project.
Carruthers focused on energy conservation, recycling, and being environmental stewards for bees and monarch butterflies.
All of their students worked on the Your Plan, Your Planet sustainability website by Google to look at how the choices we make impact our use of electricity and fossil fuels. They stepped up their recycling efforts school-wide and have been working on projects related to monarch butterflies within their 3rd grade classrooms and art. They have also been providing an informational bulletin throughout the school year that talks about their observation beehive, located in the cafeteria.
To create hands-on learning around electricity, students utilized the the Your Plan, Your Planet sustainability website by Google. Students made a guess at how many hours the lights were on in their home. Then they went home and kept track on a sheet of paper exactly how long lights were on and if any one was using the rooms or not. They brought this data into school and input it into the website. The website calculated how many Kilowatt hours they used in lighting over a year. They then researched the average price of electricity in our area and calculated how much it was costing each year in lighting in their homes. They also brainstormed some ideas on how to cut down on lighting usage in their homes, especially their bedrooms, and how much money they could help their parents save.