Students all over the Lawrence school district get a little greener to celebrate Earth Day.

Second-graders at Prairie Park School buried a variety of objects six weeks ago. Wednesday, those things were unearthed. Well, at least some of them were.

“The paper and the paper towel weren’t there anymore,” second-grader Emily Gordon-Ross said. “We couldn’t find anything.”

Other objects, like aluminum cans and Styrofoam cups, were still there in the soil.

The experiment gave the students a firsthand look at what stays and what goes when it comes to trash in landfills.

That’s why teachers wanted to make sure their kids know the three R’s: reduce, reuse and recycle.

“It helps the earth,” second-grader Dalton Nealy said. “It makes stuff that has already happened into other stuff that is already made.”

Across town at Deerfield School, fifth-grade students reused and recycled their way to new paper and birdhouses. They are also planning to use their Friday lunch scraps in a compost heap.

“I think it’s good to recycle because the Earth is getting more and more polluted,” fifth-grader Sam Fanisher said. He made a birdhouse out of an old plastic container he found at home.

Fifth-grader Lexie Freeman took a giant bottle and created her new habitat. She thinks Earth Day is an important holiday to observe.

“It’s a chance to make the Earth beautiful and to make sure that pollution doesn’t pollute our Earth,” Freeman said.

The first Earth Day was celebrated by 20 million people in 1970. The late Gaylord Nelson, a United States senator from Wisconsin, planted the seed that has blossomed into a day that is celebrated across the planet.