Most of us ignore the trees that surround us in our school or in our locality. Let us make friends with the trees that surround us. So, take out your notebook and get ready to investigate the trees around you.

This is the first activity lesson in the Creative Lesson Plan on Tree booklet. As part of its activity book series on environment education, Ecology and Natural Resource Education Project (ENRE), has brought out a series of booklets on various environment education topics. The project initiated by the Development Research Communication and Services Centre, Calcutta aims to integrate environment science into various taught subjects. The first in the series, the book is a bank of innovative activities to learn about multi purpose trees by first collecting information of the names of the trees and then finding out the useful trees for various requirements in your locality. The activities are designed so that the children learn through their own experience and observation integrated with the lesson plans. The book gives the educators a chance to do more than tree plantations when teaching about benefits of having trees around us. The activities mentioned are student oriented and classroom friendly and makes for an easy to use booklet.

Let me introduce you to the family of Insects – ants, cockroach, worms and thousands more of these that you often see moving around your house. Unfortunately we never pay attention to them and even when they come out to make friends with us we either greet them with screams or at worse attempt to kill them. Insects are an important part of our ecosystem and we should know them as friends of the environment. To bridge this gap between the insect world, and us, ENRE has created a creative lesson plan on Insect and Worms. The second in the series, the activities cover mosquitoes, ants, and honeybee among the insects. It also makes an effort to explain the concept of pollination and vermicomposting. It ends with the mention of an increasing menace that pesticide use has caused and also gives a list of alternatives that exist to the use of pesticides.

National Conference on Water and Waste Management

For the first time schools from all over India came together to attend the first national conference for schools to discuss and share their experience on water and waste management.

A two-day conference was organised by Salwan Public School at the India International Centre, New Delhi. The conference held on the April 19th and 20th was attended by various schools within and outside Delhi. Justice B N Kirpal inaugurated the conference by lighting the lamp, followed by a Stuti dance. This was followed by a song on water pollution "Nadi kahan se beh kar aye." Various NGOs were invited and they gave presentations on topics of water harvesting and waste management. This included a session on paper recycling and the schools learnt how to recycle paper on their own. On the second day, the participanting schools gave their presentations, which was followed by discussion. The conference helped them to become aware of the problems of water pollution and learnt the importance of rain. They also learnt how they could make biogas using kitchen waste. The conference concluded by awarding of certificates and medals to the participants followed by vote of thanks and speech by Mr Sushil Dutt Salwan, the chairman of Salwan Public School.