Staff Writer

Kennebunkport’s Consolidated Elementary School has a green theme song, green solar energy systems and soon a green classroom.

“What will go in there?” Ben Johnson, a first grader at the school asked his teacher, Christine Kellett.

The green classroom is a foreign idea to many of the younger students. Situated outside, with only four posts in the ground and a roof, it doesn’t look like a typical classroom. Kellett explained the open outdoor room would be used for science lessons or quiet reading.

“Can I bring my sleeping bag?” asked Christopher Fortin, also a first-grader in Kellett’s class.

Inside the classroom’s four open walls will eventually hold large boulders and tree stumps for the students to sit on, but it’s the roof that has everyone digging in the ground.

Kellett’s class was planting Sapphire, a type of grass with an extensive root system. After students fill their cardboard boxes with dirt, they dug a hole to the bottom of the box and place the grass inside, root first.

“Root is where the brown is and grass is where the green is,” explained Johnson, pointing to the long worm-like roots and green grass in his dirt covered fist.

Kellett’s class isn’t the only one to take advantage of the warm weather. Jenn Humphrey’s fourth-grade students were outside, too, in the school’s green house.

The fourth-graders are using cereal boxes to plant moss-looking thyme and dianthus.

Kelly Ryan, a fourth-grader, said students use the cardboard as makeshift planters because eventually the cardboard will disintegrate, leaving a healthy plant.

Once everything is planted, the cardboard planters from both the first and fourth grade classes and any other classes who plant, will be moved on top of the green classroom roof and Mother Nature will do the rest, giving the plants water and sunlight.

Many of the students have experiences with gardens before, learning about photosynthesis in the classroom and in their parents’ flowerpots.

The hope is over time the plants will bloom and grow, obscuring the wooden structure under vines and green leaves.

“It’ll look kind of like a cave in years to come,” Kellett said. “You’ll look enclosed in a piece of the earth inside.”

Staff Writer Suzanne Hodgson can be reached at 282-4337, ext. 233.