Cosmo and Checkers Go Green for Health and the Environment
Help me give my students fleece liners for our class pets so they can participate more in the daily care of our class guinea pigs - Cosmo and Checkers.
I am a special education teacher at one of the best schools around. We are a Pre-K-5 school with over 1000 students from diverse backgrounds. We are part of a larger learning community, and we engage our neighboring community for food banks, needy child fund, a tele-medicine clinic, club day, leadership events, parent nights, Good News Club, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Girls Inc and so much more!
We are a "Leader In Me" school where everyone can be a leader.
Everyone has genius, and we develop the whole child by building relationships and empowering students. We are a diverse community. Despite our large size, we partner up for many things and relationships are built beyond your own classroom. We do club days where students from multiple grades work together on things that interest them. Older students often give up their recess to help the younger students practice sight words and math facts.
My Project
Our classroom has 2 guinea pigs that are our class pets. They were gifted to us by a fellow co-worker who could not care for them anymore. That was over 2 years ago. Cosmo and Checkers are part of our day. Students help by filling their water bottles and feeding them food and hay. The only thing they don't do is clean the pine bedding. I do that right before taking them home each weekend.
We realized, we go through a lot of pine bedding and it's not the best thing for our guinea pigs - fleece is so much better.
The pine bedding creates dust causing respiratory problems for the guinea pigs and my students, The wood shavings can create slivers that hurt the animals feet, and we can tell on Friday, that it needs changing because it stinks!
A friend showed me how easy the fleece bedding was for her class guinea pigs and then she washes it and reuses it. Twice a day with a little hand held broom and dustpan she cleans up solid messes and the washing machine takes care of the other mess. We even have a washing machine at school and we are teaching the children how to use it. We need a couple of fleece bedding pads to rotate as we wash them and hang to dry.
These will eliminate the need for pine bedding which adds 2 trash bags a week to the landfill and is healthier for students and Cosmo and Checkers.
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