City Montessori School, Lucknow, India

CMS Impact

LINK TO ANOTHER CULTURE AND COMMUNITY IN INDIA

- riverlands school Australia

We contacted several other schools around the world to see what they were doing to help their local environment. In the end we found that a school with a similar philosophy to ours was doing things that most interested us. We chose to communicate further with The City Montessori School in Lucknow in India as they were helping to solve pollution problems with the river in their local area.

Their river is called the Gomti River which has become very polluted because of the huge population and the demands this places on it.

The City Montessori School has the privilege of being in the Guinness Book of Records for having the largest number of students enrolled (30,000 in 2000 in its 15 branch campuses in Lucknow)

The school has a great motto: "One Day I will change the world,"
and its educational goals are:
Universal Values,
Global Understanding,
Excellence in all Things
and Service to Humanity.

Students at this school join community volunteers every Sunday morning to clean rubbish from the river and from along its banks. We were very inspired by the children's work and it prompted us to work at better preserving the small creek that runs through our school grounds. We found pigface and other weeds that had been washed down the waterways and had established themselves along the banks. We have been spending part of our lunchtimes removing the weeds and educating the younger children to look after the fragile environment by not digging away the banks of the creek when creating cubbies.

We have suggested to our sister school that they research the history of their river by asking older people to come in to school to talk and to share their memories of how their river was in the past. This would be a valuable historic record. We are also sharing information on the plight of the worlds frogs and sending details of how the children can create frog arks in their playgrounds and at home to help preserve their declining numbers.

Link to City Montessori School, Lucknow in India. http://www.cmseducation.org/

Link to Riverlands School in Australia. http://www.riverlands.wa.edu.au/