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[#1]

Have your students go home and do a "Home Energy Inspection" too see how much energy their home is wasting.  Encourage them to check four areas:

Lighting: Unlike incandescent bulbs that heat a metal filament to produce light, CFLs use far less energy by running a current through a tube containing argon gas and mercury vapor. This process uses about 75% less energy than incandescents, and the bulbs last 10 times longer.

Appliances: Appliances like computers and TVs still drain power while turned off. This “standby power” accounts for 5-10% of energy used in homes, making it responsible for almost 1% of global CO 2 emissions.

Recycling: The United States recycles 32% of its waste; this saves an amount of greenhouse gas equivalent to removing 39.6 million cars from the road. Increasing the rate to 35% would reduce emissions by an additional 5.2 million metric tons.

Cooling: Home heating and cooling systems are the largest energy consumers in the home, so saving energy here can have the biggest effect the fastest. U.S. electricity consumption totaled nearly 3,741 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) in 2009.

That’s about 13 times greater than 1950.

Then, once they bring their inspections back to school, discuss how they can reduce energy usage in the areas above and have each student write an "energy reduction plan" for their own home.

[#2]

This looks like a fun thing to do. I'd love to see a hand out for the kids to take home so they could do this with their parents. Then back in school they could write their "energy" plan. ANother good idea would be to have someone come in from PSE&G or other local utilities company, They are always looking to do things like that.

Stacy Kasse

third grade