Clean and Green

Keep Iowa Beautiful introduces Clean and Green, a comprehensive program combining best practice and educational research to provide engaging activities that can stand alone, but are more powerful when used as a comprehensive unit.

• Helping schools teach the essential concepts of the Iowa Core Curriculum is the first goal of Clean and Green. The Iowa Core guides the curriculum for all Kindergarten-12th grade schools in Iowa.
   
• Service learning is connected with excellence in education from the early grades through college and beyond, and is at the heart of the Keep Iowa Beautiful philosophy of youth education. The Second Grade program classes to plan, carry out and reflect on community projects.
   
• Citizenship is the sixth pillar of character, and the central value of Clean and Green. In addition to the pillars, identified in each lesson, the Four Keys of Character Education—safe, challenging community, self study, other study and public performance—guide the selection of activities for the program to provide lessons that are varied in approach, and strong outcomes for students and schools.
   
• Place-based education encourages teachers and students to use the schoolyard, community, and public lands as extensions of their classrooms. Project-focused and tailored by local people to local realities, place-based education is equally relevant in small towns and big cities, equally effective for kindergarten through high school.

Keep Iowa Beautiful is piloting Clean and Green in Davenport public and parochial schools, and working to expand its use throughout the Mississippi Bend Area, to Dubuque, Des Moines and Waterloo, and then across the state. Working on a broad-reaching beautification, service learning and environmental initiative for youth, will make a difference not only in the environment, but on the positive development of Iowa youth.

Funded in part by a grant from: