Sorry for interrupting the very long blog on Peru – (In some ways I feel it is turning into a toilet roll, I don’t mean it is like what you use toilet roll for! mmm I seem to be digressing to faeces once again it appears to be inevitable with me! What I mean to say it is just like a very good toilet roll it is soft, very long and thoroughly absorbant or it appears to be by looking at comments by the readers. Pisco Sours, Ponchos & Panpipes PART 8 will be resuming shortly but I interrupt it for a special announcement about how you and your students can save the world in just one minute!
Someone very important and famous once said ‘it only takes a minute girl’ (well actually it was Gary Barlow but if you read about this great opportunity below you will see that he was right!)
There is a global competition being run which I read about in the Guardian newspaper before I went to Peru in the summer called one minute to save the world. The competition is to produce a one minute video and upload it to a website in the hope of winning £1000. The idea behind it is to enable anyone, anywhere, to deliver a short but powerful message to the world on the most important issue of our day – climate change. While I was heading for Peru in August I had already decided I would do this with some of my key stage 3 students as a short project in September however whilst I was experiencing what you may have read in Pisco Sours, Ponchos & Panpipes I suddenly made the connection between this competition and what the charity Cool Earth is trying to do.
One of the easiest ways to ‘save the world’ is to prevent climate change and we can do this by protecting our rainforests. 50 million acres of rainforest – an area nearly the size of the UK – are cut down every year, emitting six billion tonnes of CO2. They are the richest stores of carbon we have and protecting them is the number one priority in tackling climate change. Rainforests are made of carbon ‐ lots and lots of the stuff. When the forest is destroyed, this carbon is released into the atmosphere as CO2 and causes global warming. The trees, plants and soil in each acre of rainforest lock‐up enough carbon to create 260 tonnes of CO2.
Cool Earth is a global charity launched in June 2007 that funds community led protec6on of endangered rainforest. With the support of over 50,000 individual sponsors and companies in 14 different countries, Cool Earth works with rainforest people to ensure rainforest is worth more standing than it is cut.
How it works:
1. Cool Earth operates in six coun6es in South America to identify rainforest that is at greatest risk of destruction in the coming 18 months.
2. Once the risks are identified, Cool Earth works with regional governments and partner NGOs to forge relations with communities whose livelihoods, health and sustainability will be damaged by the deforestation.
3. With their agreement, Cool Earth works to secure the at‐risk rainforest by funding the community to purchase or protect it.
4. All Cool Earth asks is that the forest canopy, its biodiversity and carbon storage are kept intact.
You may have heard that Cool Earth http://www.coolearth.org/ With Cool Earth you can protect an acre of rainforest for £60. This will protect 260 tonnes of CO2, 44 mature trees and 190 saplings. Working with Google, Cool Earth enables you to see the acre that you are protecting.
Actually in fact keep an eye out as they are about to launch their new ‘Cool School’ programme where you can sign your school up to gain access to a network of resources and other schools.
So I decided to create some fully resourced lessons that allowed students to enter this global competition whilst learning all about the work of Cool Earth and also the story of the Ashaninka people.
You can use all of the resources I have created to also get involved and let your students have a chance of winning and learning about this important topic. The lesson plan, resource booklet, video to set the scene and PowerPoint can all be downloaded at http://drop.io/coolearth or from Microsoft’s Innovative Teachers Network by clicking on the following link: http://bit.ly/no4nF
For the second one you will need to sign up however you will then get access to many more excellent resources and materials as well as being able to network with other innovative teachers from around the world.
All the information you need to complete the project is in the resources. I hope you will sign up and have a go with your students. Please let me know by if you would like any help or support. Don’t worry for those not fed up with the Pisco Sours blog there will be a new post tomorrow.