One Hour, No Power Challenge

My Grade 1s have been working on reducing our classroom energy consumption as part of the Classroom Energy Diet Challenge. One part of this project is the One Hour, No Power challenge. The task was to go without power in our classroom for an hour or try to accumulate multiple hours without power.

Student Goal Setting: Students chose to aim for accumulating 10 hours without power. For this challenge, the description stated "One hour of no power is defined as one classroom not using power for one hour. That is to say, if you have two classrooms participating for one hour each, that will equal two hours of no power. If you have three classrooms participating and they all complete three hours, that would be nine hours of no power." When I read that description aloud, students came up with a great plan of how to meet their goal...

Action Plan: In order to meet our goal, students decided to encourage other classrooms to get involved. Students decided to reach out to classrooms via Twitter and also ask the other classes in our schools to participate.

Record Keeping: To monitor our progress and keep track of the classrooms that participated, students recorded the information in a chart. This provided opportunities for learning about numbers, printing and time.

The Power of Collaboration We tallied our results today and we were able to accumulate 11 hours without power! I am really proud of my class for their great work and for their efforts to encourage other classrooms to get involved in this challenge!

A project like this demonstrates how reaching beyond your own classroom can scale up the impact of a project. Involving others also shows students the value of collaboration and lets them practice working with others in a variety of ways.