Recycle, Reduce, Reuse, the three R’s that inspired something in my life that changed who I was to who I am today. E-A-R-T-H. That was last word I wrote on the page of my 4th grade class book which was a class project. And that last word had to have some changes, which to this day I think I have changed.
As I was learning to a greater extent about the earth in my fourth grade class I discovered that it is so unbalanced and no one has been taking care of the environment due to many human behaviors such as littering, wasting, and all types of pollution. The facts I studied were out of the ordinary, and also shocking to know that this is what really happens to our earth. For example, every Sunday more than five hundred thousand trees are used to produce ninety percent of newspapers that are never recycled and started to find out more facts. Then I realized that they’re going to have to be some adjustments.
This project definitely took about six to seven months to complete, and it was worth it. My class and I had worked together to change our behaviors and to help our own families. With all that time I had been learning and adapting new information about the community and earth, and each part of me changed. I started to become more aware of my actions, my peers and my family. Every day I would come up to my parents and make them also gain knowledge of something new to I had to learn to change them, and it worked! I had always imagined the earth as a math equation, like LAND+WATER+AIR+COMMUNITY= EARTH.
Day by day I would try to fix something about each one of them to make the equation balanced. I began to take action and become aware of the environment. Step by step, I took the initiative to take action that led to recycling and cutting back on some things. I began to make other people aware of the situation like writing a letter to the whole school and the principal by starting to recycle in the school. It was convincing enough for the principal to begin recycling North Star which thrilled me and my class. Then I realized that things started to change which was that a letter made the whole school do something very helpful and useful for the earth. In other words, something small can lead to something big.
Then came the where I had present my topic in front of the whole class. The topic that I and my partner had was about recycling. Then when my teacher called up my name, I was a little nervous but excited. I was standing tall and proud when I and my partner presented the topic we studied. As I was reading my part, the words made me think once again that I shouldn’t be thinking just about myself but the whole world.