Showing posts with label Earth Day. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Earth Day. Show all posts

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Happy Earth Day!


Tomorrow is Earth Day 2012, which is supposed to be the largest civil observances in the world, as approximately one billion people across the planet celebrate it.

There are so many things I could say about honoring the Earth, but this is the nature video that currently is most inspiring me:


The video is by Norwegian photographer Ole C. Salomonsen, with music by Norwegian composer Kai-Anders Ryan.  It captures on film the aurora borealis--a topic that has always fascinated me and that is one of those things I want to be able to experience for myself someday.   Salomonsen used stop motion video to film the Northern Lights in the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, and Finland from fall 2011 - spring 2012.  He would film with two or three cameras at a time, and shot about 150,000 frames, although only 6,000 frames made it into this video.

It is such a stunning testimony to the beauty of the natural world, albeit a very different world from the green and temperate climates of North Carolina.   I hope you will enjoy it and also be moved to take some small step yourself to help keep our planet clean and healthy.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Earth Day Blog Hop

In addition to the book giveaway and webinar on teaching hands-on science that I am holding in honor of Earth Day 2011, I've decided to extend our celebration of Earth Day by hosting my first blog hop.  If you aren't familiar with a blog hop, it is a group blogging event in which a number of different blogs all agree to do posts on the same theme or topic.  Each blog posts not only its blog post on the subject, but also the list of the other blogs who are participating as well.  The idea is that each blog's set of readers can check out the posts of the other blogs as well, getting different perspectives on the theme as well as being introduced to some new blogs.

If you are a blogger and would like to participate, here is what you need to do:

1.  Between now and Earth Day 2011, which is April 22, create a post relating to Earth Day on your blog.  It should be a post that discusses Earth Day from the regular perspective of your blog.  So, for example, if you have an artistic blog, it could be an Earth Day art piece; if you write a current events or political blog, it could be news about Earth Day; and if you work or parent preschoolers, it could be about how your little ones are celebrating Earth Day.

2.  Once you have created your post, add it to the Linky Tools list at the bottom of this page.  Linky Tools is a great piece of software that makes your link appear not only on my page, but it will also update the list on any other blog that has copied the code onto their site.

3.  So, after you have added your link, you need to copy the list to your blog so that your readers can see all the other Earth Day posts.  The following are the instructions about how to do that.

To add the links to your blog, copy this code for Blogger blogs:

<script src="http://www.linkytools.com/basic_linky_include.aspx?id=84371" type="text/javascript"></script>

Or this one for free WordPress blogs:

<script src="http://www.linkytools.com/basic_linky_include.aspx?id=84371" type="text/javascript"></script>

and paste into your blog, using the Edit HTML tool.

4. Finally, you get to add this lovely button to your blog to indicate you are participating in the Earth Day Blog Hop.


Copy and paste the following code into your HTML editor in order to have the button appear on your website:

<a href="http://teachingyourmiddleschooler.blogspot.com/2011/04/earth-day-blog-hop.html"> <img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYdi1ubtJGdh7qqSqTuGs53ScjktgHni_cAUIRTr3l1Hwpt7Nfcfm092mGO7_dbz5Mr1aHaM7Bqq7CMLuTV-JXUl1zvIOo-V5ij6JErYrg1mZBHlodJd5M_9RzrYd0odj8-PVtiGMzpJg/s1600/EarthDayButton.jpg" />
</a>

And that's it!  You will be an official member of the Earth Day Blog Hop.

We have a few people already lined up for this blog hop, including Maria of Natural Math and Michelle of Homeschool Literature and Pandahoneybee's Homeschooling Adventure.  But we would love to have lots more bloggers join us!  Let's focus some blogging attention on Earth Day to remind us all of ways we can do more to appreciate and protect our planet.