Creating Your Earth-Friendly Early Childhood Program

By Patty Born Selly

The Redleaf Quick Guide series are go-to handbooks at a great price point filled with accessible, valuable information to help family child care providers and center staff take appropriate action.

The purpose of this book is to meet early childhood educators wherever they are on their journey to becoming a more eco-friendly program.

It provides examples of what an eco-friendly program looks like, with lots of big and small ways to shift their own program along the continuum.

Patty Born Selly offers practical considerations, tips, strategies and practices that can be implemented right away and helps early childhood educators understand where their program is already successfully integrating eco-friendly practices, and where you have room to grow.

The Quick Guide also identifies ways in which the outdoor environment can be used to support children’s learning and development as well as anchoring them in an eco-friendly mindset that will benefit them for the rest of their lives. 

Audience: Early childhood educators and leadership in center and family child care settings. Possible course adoption. Age Focus: birth–8 years old.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Redleaf Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781605547701

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO GO GREEN?

Since approximately the late 1990s, the number of practitioners and administrators in early childhood education looking to go green has increased. Parents and caregivers across the United States and beyond are increasingly interested in programs that emphasize Earth-friendly practices and curricula that involve behaviors such as recycling, using environmentally friendly materials, creating schoolyard gardens, and spending more time outdoors. Programs around the United States—urban and rural, corporate, locally owned, or home-based—are moving to adopt so-called green practices in response to this growing demand. Early care and education programs are striving to be healthy settings where parents and caregivers can be confident, knowing their children are in good hands. Whether your program is located in a nature-rich area or has very little access to green space, you can use the outdoor environment and other resources around you to support your eco-friendly goals, whatever they may be.

How This Book Works

If you’re reading this Quick Guide, there is a strong possibility that you’re interested in reducing the environmental impact of your program and adopting more eco-friendly practices. You’re not alone. Thousands of programs across the United States and beyond are engaged in this work in a variety of ways.

This book offers advice to help practitioners, administrators, and other caregivers adopt more eco-friendly practices and policies throughout their programs as a response to the demands of busy, concerned families. The purpose of this book is to meet you wherever you are on your journey to becoming a more eco-friendly program and

provide examples of what an eco-friendly program looks like, with lots of big and small ways to shift your own program along the continuum;

offer practical considerations, tips, strategies, and practices that you can implement right away;

help you to understand where your program is already successfully integrating eco-friendly practices and where you have room to grow;

suggest family activities, outreach, and education so that the families in your program can get engaged as well; and

help you to identify ways you can use the outdoor environment to support children’s learning and development as well as anchoring them in an eco-friendly mindset that will benefit them for the rest of their lives.

Every chapter of this book begins with a vignette about a fictitious teacher, Mr. Lopez, who runs an early care and education facility and aims to be mindful of Earth-friendly best practices wherever possible. Mr. Lopez’s story is offered as an example as one endpoint on a long continuum. Most programs won’t be able to employ all the practices that he does, but the stories about his classrooms provide lots of examples of changes both big and small that you can make.

Each chapter also gives some background information on a topic or theme. This book isn’t meant to be an exhaustive compendium of information, but there are additional recommended resources in each chapter should you wish to dig more deeply into a topic. After the background information, you will find a list of considerations for educators: simple things you can think about, look for, and notice about where your current program meets the mark and where you have room to grow. Finally, each chapter ends with practical, tangible steps you can take to implement practices on your own terms. It serves just as the series title indicates: a quick guide. That means it’s full of ideas, considerations, and practical ways you can make your own program more eco-friendly without a large investment of time or resources.

What Does It Mean to Be Earth Friendly?

First things first: What does it mean to be Earth friendly, environmentally friendly, or eco-friendly? These terms are often used interchangeably and mean different things to different people. In general, they refer to practices, approaches, and philosophies that have a positive or neutral effect on the environment, as opposed to those that have a harmful or negative effect.

One example is recycling aluminum cans. When we recycle cans, the raw materials used in their production (aluminum, mainly) can be used again and again, as long as the product is recycled after each use. In contrast, simply throwing aluminum cans into the trash and sending them to a landfill means the materials used to make the cans will linger for hundreds of years, taking up space and potentially leaching chemicals into the ground where they eventually reach aquifers, streams, rivers, and wetlands, while new materials are mined to make new cans. The process of mining itself carries similar consequences. You can think of recycling generally as a neutral act in terms of eco-friendliness. Even though Earth suffered a net loss when the resources were extracted initially, by recycling the can you are at least preventing the extraction of additional resources for that same purpose, although there is still an environmental cost to retrieve and process the recycled material to make the new cans.

Another example of an eco-friendly choice is the reduction or elimination of the use of singleuse plastics, such as plastic lunch bags, gloves, water bottles, and eating utensils, to name just a few. Once these plastic products are used, in most cities and towns these sorts of items aren’t recyclable and they immediately become part of the waste stream—the path that all products headed to the landfill take. Additionally, many single-use plastics such as bottles and food containers wind up in our waterways, where they travel to the oceans. Once there, the combination of salt from the water and heat from the sun contribute to the degradation of these plastics, breaking them down into smaller and smaller bits, which then can have a harmful effect on marine life. Throwing out single-use plastic items is an example of a negative impact on the environment. Decreasing or eliminating their use halts that negative impact and is thus an eco-friendly action.

The phrase reduce, reuse, recycle carries a lot of wisdom. Keep that guideline in mind when you’re taking steps to