On Tuesday the 11th of October Eco team started to think about what we could do for Switch Off Fortnight. We looked around the school and found that many people were using lights or other electronics without any need to. The surprise was the STAFF ROOM lights were on without anyone using it.
With the cold whether approaching,we carried on with the meter readings and updated them. We found out that we used more electricity than last year but we are doing better with gas than last year.
The readings for Gas: This year. 471 kw per hour. Last year. 479 kw per hour. Electricity: This year 2287. Last year 2230. As week three has passed, we continued the task of clearing out our school gardens. We didn't just clear out the raised beds we also cleared the poly-tunnel and the green house. Compost was added to the beds to make sure the soil is going to be ready for the next planting time. During our Eco assembly, we reminded and told people about the Eco team's blog and how to use it and comment on posts. We also had a little another visitor not the local cat but a caterpillar!
On Tuesday we began the task of clearing the raised beds ready for next spring. We had to dig out the weeds and remaining potatoes - which was hard work - for some! There was also and unexpected visitor, the local cat, who came to help! Also in cookery club, they made an Eton mess with the raspberries picked over the summer - Yum!
After all our hard work harvesting, we decided to sell some of the veg (for a small donation) outside of school at home time. Thank you to everyone who took some - we hope it tasted as good as it looked!
With the remaining veg, we decided to contact St Luke's Church in Ferryhill where there is a Foodbank every Thursday. Two members of the Eco Group helped to make the delivery and meet some of the volunteers who work there. On our return to school after the summer holidays, we were greeted with an array of wonderful vegetables that had all enjoyed growing in the summer sunshine. Reception class set to work harvesting and dug up bucket fulls of onions, beetroot, marrows and leeks (which proved a little difficult to get out of the ground - it took three children to pull out one huge leek!). Well done everyone for all your hard work planting beds and looking after them - not long before we'll be doing it all again.
This week the school is taking part in 'Waste Week' and we are trying our best to get everybody involved. Don't worry about thinking what you can do to get involved as the Eco group will be doing our own assembly on Monday morning to tell you all you need to know.
Our focus for the campaign will be food waste - including plastic bottles and food packaging. Activities that will be included throughout the week will be getting to complete a food diary which will help to investigate how much food you throw away in school and at home. So get ready for Waste Week, and remember not to waste it! We went round the school with our review checking what was right and what was wrong but it was good news because we could only find one thing wrong - recycling. Everything else that we needed to check such as: Fairtrade, sustainability, biodiversity and many others, were fine.
We have started to solve the recycling issue by bringing in our old mobile phones, clothes and putting our used paper in the recycling bin as well as putting our old water in the watering can at the end of the day. Now that this problem is sorted, we can submit our review knowing everything is done. This is a big step towards getting the green flag! Even though it was freezing cold, with snow on the ground, we put our coats and hats on and went down to the bird hide to watch for birds. We went in the hut and got out our binoculars and sheets to check off which birds we saw and then the hardest part was being silent.
It took us a while but we saw blackbirds, house sparrows, wood pigeons, chaffinches and black headed gulls. On the way back up we saw three starlings and a blue tit. It was really good but we could have seen more if we had gone earlier because the birds had already eaten. 'I enjoyed seeing quite a few birds' - Nicole 'I was surprised by all the different birds' - Adam All of our eco work had make us very hungry so we decided we would make our own eco omelettes, from our very own chicken eggs laid by Lizzie and her friends. We collected the eggs and left the hard work to the chefs who made us a tray of delicious omelettes.
We thought this would help the environment by not putting our eggs to waste and put the egg shells in the compost. Everybody enjoyed their omelettes! 'The omelettes were egglicous!' - Maisie 'I loved my eggs' - Adam 'Eggscellent' - Ewan |
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