Today's Kool Idea: Celebrate Earth Day with Earth Promise

Today, schools all over the country are celebrating Earth Day. Teachers everywhere are educating children in an effort to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's environment. Though we at The Daily Kool are fairly confident in our overall parenting skills, we are ashamed to admit that we have been failing our children in a very important way. We have not focused nearly enough on teaching them to respect nature and the environment. This goes beyond our responsibility to lecture our kids about the importance of Earth Day. It is our obligation (especially as parents) to encourage future generations to do their part to help preserve our wonderful planet...something that can only be achieved if we practice what we are preaching every day.

Sound a bit overwhelming? We thought so, too. Then, we connected with our friends at Earth Promise and discovered how little changes can make a big difference. Earth Promise is an online community that helps people just like us make changes (called earth promises) in our everyday lives to improve the earth's condition and help preserve our precious resources. These changes can be as simple as keeping the window closed during highway driving (increases fuel efficiency) or using your local library more (instead of purchasing new books). We were surprised at how many earth promises there were like these that can also save us money in today's economy.

Here's how we got started. We set up a free Earth Promise account, establishing our user name and password. Unsure where to start, we browsed some earth promises that other members have made to get some ideas. We like that the website offers a wizard to help us figure out which earth promises might be right for us, but we actually found the starter plan to be a more helpful tool for our purposes. There is also a growing community of other Earth Promise members with established groups, forums, blog topics and other resources.

After touring the site, familiarizing ourselves with its functionality and making a few earth promises to get us started, we decided to hold off on adding any others without our children with us. After all, we want to show our children how just person making one small change can have a tremendous impact on the environment. We can't wait for the kids to come home from school. We are going to spend the afternoon on the Earth Promise website together.

Earth Promise is such a great teaching tool, we can picture its appeal to educators and parents world-wide. It not only shows how easily we can incorporate small, earth-friendly changes to everyday activities, but it inspires children to learn the importance of keeping their promises. Earth Promise is definitely worth checking out. It's a great idea for us, and an even better idea for our children. Together, we can really make a difference...on Earth Day, and everyday. Now, that's a "kool" idea.

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