It is said that pretty much all the honest truth telling in the world is done by children and for the children to form their truth they need to acquaint themselves with the true current reality and the best way to go about it is OBSERVATION.
Ecological Leadership Development Programme (ELDP) enhances the child’s skill of observation and helps in their educational growth. We believe that education is not just books or mugging up, it revolves around learning from activities and discussions. We as volunteers never teach the children but we learn together and share knowledge amongst us of the current reality that we more often than not completely ignore.
In the same case when you consider a child with a developing mind, they don’t ignore it, they question it, try to rectify it. For an instance, while discussing about how plastic bags are harmful to the environment and why are vendors not completely going with the use of paper bags, we received many answers. One said “why use paper bags, don’t we have to cut down trees to get the paper? Can’t we have any other alternative?” The children were correct, this led to the discussion of bioplastics, which soon became a hot topic among them. Bioplastics are plastic materials produced from renewable biomass sources, such as vegetable fats and oils, corn starch, straw, woodchips, sawdust, recycled food waste, etc.
One of the activities that was conducted with the students was the paper bag activity. In this activity the students had collected waste paper and made paper bags with it. When we asked them what will they do with these bags, we received one very thoughtful answer. They said we can donate as many as possible it to our local vendor monthly so that they wont use plastic bags and don’t have to pay for a paper bag, in turn they can give us one chocolate so that they won’t hesitate to take it for free. This is how they function. Doing small tasks and making a huge difference unknowingly with their innocent souls and minds. To save earth, we need to educate our developing minds with the focus on not just biology, chemistry and history but also with the degradation of the environment and mankind. Not only in schools and classes but in our own homes too.
