PIMS students donate
energy related placemats to local eatery
By Scott Mitchell Johnson
PRESQUE ISLE – Patrons of Teresa’s Corner Café & Bakery in Presque Isle can now educate themselves on how to reduce, reuse and recycle while at the same time enjoy a meal at the downtown eatery.
LIAM DANIELS, right, now a seventh-grader at Presque Isle Middle School, presents Teresa Bonville, owner of Teresa’s Corner Café & Bakery in Presque Isle, with the laminated placemat he made as part of a sixth-grade service-learning project aimed at showing people how to reduce or conserve energy use. Sixty placemats that were created by students in Elaine Hendrickson’s class were recently donated to the local eatery.
Before school let out for summer vacation, sixth-graders at Presque Isle Middle School created placemats that displayed many ways that people can reduce and recycle – or conserve – their use of energy.
Science teacher Elaine Hendrickson was asked to join KIDS (Kids Involved Doing Service-Learning) Consortium, which helps transform classrooms and communities through an award-winning educational model that has touched more than a quarter-million students to date.
“The students were challenged to come up with a project that would either help the school or the community and we came up with the idea to create placemats,” she said. “I wanted to do something with helping the environment because one of my goals of earth science is to make sure that the students become stewards of the environment. I wanted them to be aware of how much garbage is out there.”
The students began the service-learning project by viewing part of the National Geographic video, “Human Footprint.”
“The video shows the number of products a person will use in his or her lifetime,” said Hendrickson. “For example, an average person will drink 43,371 cans of soda, which amazed the students. Following this, Hilary McNamee from Fort Fairfield, who currently skis for the Dartmouth Ski Team, came in to share how she was trying to reduce the footprint people would leave at the Junior Olympics held at the Nordic Heritage Center this winter.”
Nancy Chandler from Maine Public Service presented information to the students on the use of electricity in a household and ways to reduce power consumption. She also presented eight kilowatt meters for the students to use, as well as many pamphlets.
“The students were then asked to conduct an action research project where they had to keep track of one item that they used for a week,” said Hendrickson. “At the end of the week, they drew outlines of their feet and recorded the amount they used and what their plan was to reduce its use. Once the surveys were completed, the students shared results with each other and the posters were put in the hall for others to see.”
Students also studied the layers of the atmosphere that included a discussion of the ozone layer, constructed models of the atmosphere, and learned about the greenhouse effect and global warming.
All of the sixth-graders made placemats – about 60 in total – and each had to feature at least four tips for the community.
Some of the students created games on their placemats including mazes and word finds.
Student Liam Daniels’ placemat features an “Unplug It” theme.
“Some appliances use energy while they are plugged in like cell phone chargers,” he said. “Even when your phone’s not charging but the charger’s plugged in, it’s using energy. You can save money and energy by unplugging it … the same is true for a toaster.
“Hopefully the placemats will make people more aware of how much energy they are consuming and that they might want to try other strategies to save energy,” said Daniels.
“I’m hoping this will help show the public that the students are interested in the environment and what’s going on,” Hendrickson said.
Daniels recently presented the laminated placemats to Teresa Bonville, owner of Teresa’s Corner.
“I think the placemats are wonderful,” she said. “It will give customers something educational to look at while they’re waiting for their order and it may help them save money – and the environment – at the same time.”
