Community Building with Trash - Uppers
Community is such a large part of what makes the Center School a special place. We gather every Friday, there is play between grades, there are caregiver nights. In the Uppers, we love to lay that community foundation from the start of the school year. We build in time to all come together for group games, group skits about our Norms and expectations for the year, and group community work. Every September there is an opportunity for everyone to go out and be part of our larger community spanning from New Hampshire to Connecticut. Last weekend was dedicated to the Green River Clean Up, but schools and other organizations are invited to be part of it in the days leading up to the larger clean up on the 27th. All along the Connecticut River in Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut, there are 100s of groups who gather to clean up our watershed and the Uppers were excited to be one of those groups last Friday.
In preparation for our work cleaning up, we studied what happens in the Connecticut watershed. Students made some guesses about what the word watershed means. Our guesses included:
A shed that controls water
Area where a river and stream are connected and where people live
Where the river goes into the ocean
Filter of plastic and microplastics
Where water sheds down a mountain
A map of water in the area
How the water cycle interacts with a certain area
The water in a certain area
These guesses are very close to the actual definition by the NOAA: “a land area that channels rainfall and snowmelt to creeks, streams, and rivers, and eventually to outflow points such as reservoirs, bays, and the ocean.” But what does that all mean? And how can we see why it matters?
Students were tasked with building a watershed that mimics our own, an area with mountains, water features, and spaces where humans live. They used paper and tinfoil to build up their mountains and then used the creases in the tin foil to show where streams, rivers, and lakes would be. We talked about why people would choose to live near rivers (for drinking,recreation, or transportation) and how those activities might impact the water. In order to show this, we added color using markers on the tinfoil to show where the water flows and a different color for the spaces where there are people. After we designed and colored our watersheds, we sprayed water to mimic rainfall. All the water in our watersheds became murky, showing the human impact on the watershed. Students reflected on what we saw, saying, “Communities got flooded,” “we can see swirls of pollution,” “A lot of humans impacted the water.” Our next step was to get out into our community and see how big of an impact humans can make, both negatively and positively.
On Friday afternoon, the Uppers left school and spent 2 hours working our way along a creek filling garbage bags with all kinds of trash. We barely made our way down the creek before students started yelling, “my bag is so heavy!” There were clothes that had been left behind, garbage bags dumped into the creek, bottles and cans, bits of plastic and scraps of wrappers, we even found a fully inflated basketball. As we continued on, we began to find some large items. We came across 3 shopping carts, a baby stroller, half a scooter, a discarded play kitchen, and a mini tricycle covered in mud from where it was neglected. Students speculated on why people would leave things or how the items would have gotten into the creek. There was also a lot of discussion about keeping items versus throwing them away. Unfortunately we don’t take anything home, we don’t know how it got to the river or what it might be covered in. Our main goal was just to remove as much debris that doesn’t need to be in the water as possible to save it from getting into our rivers and then ultimately becoming microplastic in the ocean.
In 2 hours, we only got a short way down the creek because there was so much trash along our way. We ended up using the shopping carts in order to help us haul the heavy bags to their pick up spot, filling all 3 carts with trash. It was incredible to see how hard these kids worked in the mud and afternoon humidity to get as much cleaned up as they could. During our time at the river, we were joined by a neighborhood cat who caused a lot of excitement and a local reporter from the Greenfield Recorder. She interviewed a few of our 8th graders who reflected on their time cleaning. You can read the article here: https://recorder.com/2025/09/28/volunteers-protect-their-streams-and-rivers-in-29th-annual-source-to-sea-cleanup/
After the clean up, we went back to school and had a debrief on the experience. We shared a rose and thorn about the day. Students had lots of positive things to say about the experience. Some positive thoughts included:
My rose was pulling out all the shopping carts (even though it was hard to do!)
I was happy to help the community.
I’m glad we got to pet a cat! (unfortunately he had a collar and we didn’t get to keep him)
It was fun finding so many cool things.
It was fun to chat with my friends while we were working.
Some of our challenges included:
My thorn was getting so dirty!
It was hotter than I expected
Some of the things we found were gross.
It was too muddy for sneakers, I wish I had my boots!
Although there were thorns to our day, these students still dug in and did hard work and found ways to have fun with it and with each other. There was definitely some competition to find the weirdest thing in the river!. At the end of our reflection, Vanessa mentioned how proud she was of all the hard work the kids put in and I think that it is a reflection of how much we make serving our community a priority in the Uppers both in and out of the building. As these students get ready to leave for their journey after the Center School, they will be leaving with a strong understanding of the importance of not just building a community, but of taking care of it as well!
