When Laura Jett's 4th-grade students in Carol Stream, Illinois, decided to help the environment, they really got off on the right foot. They began to collect old rubber-soled shoes and sneakers that could be used to make bouncy, safe playground surfaces. "It's a project that's really different," says Brian Evans, 9. "I'd never heard of putting rubber into playgrounds."

Today many playgrounds cushion the ground with wood chips called mulch. The Heritage Lakes School students learned they could recycle rubber from old shoes to make a safer, more earth-friendly surface. The project had double benefits for the planet: it saved trees by creating a replacement for wood chips, and it used old shoes, which otherwise might have been dumped in landfills.

The students started a school-wide "Old Shoe Drive" and split into groups. One group made flyers asking kids to bring in old shoes. Another contacted newspaper reporters and local TV stations to get the word out. Rebecca Genovise, 9, loved her task as official shoe counter. "I liked being the first person to know how many we had," she says.

The class set a goal of collecting 350 pairs of shoes. They ended up with 471 pairs! Did that surprise Jett? Nope. "This is a highly motivated group," she says proudly.

The class sent the shoes to the Nike company, which runs a playground-building program called Participating in the Lives of American Youth (play). The soles were shredded into rubber mulch that pads a new playground. Somewhere kids are sliding, swinging and skidding on Carol Stream's old shoes. Jett's class really gets a kick out of that!

--By Jay R. Ehrlich. Reported by Maggie Sieger/Carol Stream