BC Hydro Community Champions Workshop

On Friday, I got the opportunity to take six students to a special B.C. Hydro school program about their Community Champions initiative. The students wrote letters of application to be chosen, and they were very excited to go!  There were four schools participating in the workshop, which was held at another school.

The first activity we did was an icebreaker where we went around and introduced ourselves to three new people and told them two things we did to help the environment. When we got back to our group, we created a poster of all the ideas we heard. Next, we went on a gallery walk of all of the posters and voted for our favourite ideas.

Next, our presenter, Wendy, explained a bit more about the Community Champions program. Fifteen non-profit environmental organizations each produced a two-minute video about their work. The public can watch the videos and vote for their favourites (Just click on the link above to go to the site and vote for yourself!). The five organizations with the most votes by the December 7 deadline each win a $10 000 prize to help them achieve their goals.

This is where schools come in. Classes can watch the videos and vote for their favourite organization. When a class votes, they can also submit a proposal for their own environmental conservation project. If chosen, the class can win $1000 to help fund their idea - so cool! (Guess what we'll be working on in the next couple of weeks?!?)

After we heard about the program, each group was given one of four words: community, champion, sustainability, conservation. We got "community", and we had to create a brainstorm web of what this words means to us. Then we presented our web to the rest of the groups.

Our final activity was to create a way of presenting the information we had learned that we could show the rest of our classmates. Our group chose to create a skit and we will be presenting it to the class this week.

Overall, it was an informative and fun morning. I was so proud of my students. They were active, enthusiastic participants, and did a great job representing our class and school. Now I can't wait for us to watch the videos and start brainstorming our own project proposal!