Looking Through the Green Glass: Climate Change Tools for education leaders is a book about teaching and environment which needed kids art to complete it. So Tyee had an art competition, with each entry donating 5 dollars to Tyee (100$ maximum) for sustainability projects (CAN). You can see who won here: http://tyee.vsb.bc.ca/News0809/Through%20the%20Green%20Glass.html

(Mine was the first one in the second prize section) There were a lot of other kids from Tyee CAN in the winner’s list: Kendra, Suchita, Everan, and Byron. The next fundraiser for CAN that we will do is the Eco-Calendar, using some of the art that didn’t get into the book. We will also put kid’s poetry, environmental statements, and green tips in the calendar.

Two days ago, on Friday, Breakfast Television did a live program on UBC Farm and the predicament it is in. Since I have been both one of the kids in the Landed Learning Project and one of the volunteers at the FarmWonders summer camp, I got an approximately-ten-second interveiw. The previous week I had helped get kids to come so they could be ‘working’ in the background to sort of give a feel for what it was like to be on the farm. Also, kids were working in the background because the children’s program would be cut under all three of the solutions UBC proposed. One of the ideas the UBC Farm-ers had was to put the farm in the agricultural land reserve, a quickly diminishing quota of should-be protected farms. I sure hope the farm gets saved.

The Glocal Education conference today was not only inspiring, it housed the first meeting of the Children’s Association for Nature. Gl0cal is a combination of global and local, how local action contributes to global change. It’s also about how when tackling global issues you need to think about the problems in your own community, and about how change really starts within one individual.

First there was a speaker, the co-founder of 4REAL, a movement which combines media, music, dance, and culture to inspire young people to take action for the environment. The talk was very interesting, although hiphop and the modern sort of music is not really my thing.

Next everyone split up into thier seperate groups for each workshop. I was doing the WildEd one. We did some really cool activities. One of them involved talking with different people in the workshop about different aspects of your experiences in nature. There were several video clips we watched. We did one activity where when you wanted to say something about the earth you would put up both hands to catch the earthball. Overall it was an inspiring workshop although I fear that I will not be able to adequetly describe it.

After a short lunch break, instead of going to the next workshop all the kids from the 5 schools who me and Zoë invited went downstairs and had a meeting for about an hour. Unfourtunately, Zoë had to go home because she was not feeling well. First we discussed things each of our schools were doing to help the environment, and afterwards we talked about ideas for what we could do. Most of them had to do with fundraisers, and were one of the the two parts of them: How to raise the money and what to give it to. We all voted for one of each of the three things which were something that was not a fundraiser and the two parts of a fundraiser. In the end the decision was to start a garden at Gladstone because it is near all the other schools and has lots of space, while for the fundraiser to raise money through a craft fair to protect the Amazon rainforest.

I found a cool article about how a kid communicates with cuttlefish. Here’s the link:

http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/7ahln/bored_octopus_shoots_out_lights_then_trashes/c0649kw

On halloween, as I said I would earlier, I make an Eco-Kid superhero costume and carried my trick-or-treat for rainforests box. All together I raised $10.50 . My dad is going to take the box to his office along with all the candy we didn’t want (quite a substantial amount, by the way) so that people who make a donation can take some.