Famous from his roles on the “Muppets” and “Sesame Street,” Kermit the Frog once advised that “It’s not easy being green.” If our planet could speak, it would probably concur with that sentiment. Acknowledging the increasingly difficult challenges facing our environment, in 1991 a Boston, Massachusetts, US-based educational nongovernmental organization set out to give our Earth a little help.
The Urban Ecology Institute (UEI) created two age-appropriate newsletters that are distributed to students in Boston and surrounding communities. The newsletters are written by teenagers for students in grades two through eight. In 1997, the group established a website, www.greenscreen.org, to enable these materials to reach a wider audience.
In 2005, the US State Department Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs (OES) began looking for a mechanism through which to establish a person-to-person dialogue about science between Americans and people around the world. OES offered to provide UEI with seed money for the initial translation into French and Arabic of the Greenscreen website and web-based materials.
The new Greenscreen.org website is an informal educational tool aiming to build peer-to-peer contact between US and overseas students in a nonpolitical way. The website also encourages students in science writing and critical thinking and hopes to build bridges through a shared interest in science, technology and environmental issues. Greentimes teacher guides in Arabic and French are available online in PDF format. The teacher guides help develop student skills in subject areas such as science, math, language arts, art and music. The materials give step-by-step, how-to instructions for carrying out student projects and scientific experiments in the classroom.
