By Madina Toure
Gifted and talented third graders at the PS 32 State Street School in Flushing started a school-wide booster campaign to raise money to help protect the Amazon rainforest in South America.
Since November, 32 third-grade students have been working to support the rainforest by selling crafts they made at a holiday boutique and selling boosters, which involved cutting and designing paper into themes such as fruits and animals based on a student’s grade. The project will continue until the end of the school year.
“There were leaves and butterflies and stars and each grade brought boosters home to raise money and they brought it back and they added it to the tree,” said Lisa Hamlin, a third-grade gifted and talented teacher whose class worked on the project. “So we have this big beautiful tree in our hallway now and they raised over $750 so far.”
The Amazon Rainforest takes up 40 percent of Brazil’s total geographical area, according to the Smithsonian National Zoological Park’s website.
The rainforest is the drainage basin for the Amazon River and its tributaries, covering about 2,722,000 square miles, the website said. The Amazon River Basin is roughly 4,195 miles long and is the biggest river basin worldwide.
In the last 50 years, about 17 percent of the forest in the Amazon has been lost, mainly due to forest conversion for cattle ranching, according to the World Wide Fund.
The Amazon’s rainforests contain 90 to 140 billion metric tons of carbon, which could be released in substantial amounts with deforestation.
The project came to fruition while the students were studying South America as part of the school’s curriculum and decided to write persuasive essays about it, Hamlin said.
“They felt compelled to write about why it’s important to save the rainforest and then it kind of just ballooned from there,” she said.
The students sent home a letter to families asking for donations. Families sent in a $1 donation and signed a booster, similar to the ones hanging in food stores, that went home with the letter.
The boosters consisted of caterpillars for kindergartners, cocoa beans for first graders, butterflies for second graders, bananas for third graders, leaves for fourth graders and stars for fifth graders. Once the donation and booster were returned to school, the booster was then hung up on a tree.
The students also distributed infomercials they wrote and filmed on the rainforest’s problems to different classrooms.
“We started out as an idea of how we can save the Amazon rainforest and now the whole school is getting involved,” Esther Lim, 8, said.
“One-third of the oxygen of the earth comes from the Amazon rainforest so if we don’t save it, we will run out of one-third of the oxygen in this world,” Antonio Rosario, 8, said.
The students plan to hold more fund-raisers and donate money to a charity that supports the rainforest.
Reach reporter Madina Toure by e-mail at mtour
