Eco Schools

We are all working hard to make our school more green and sustainable. In November 2010 we were very pleased to be awarded with the Green flag award.

These are some of the things we have done:

• The eco team met to share everyone’s ideas for how we can improve our school. Ideas for recycling, energy saving, saving water, healthy living were all shared. We wrote an Action Plan for our school using the pupils’ ideas.
• The eco team have made posters and signs to remind everyone to turn off lights, turn off taps, recycle, close doors, and set up scrap paper drawers. The signs were laminated and can be seen all around school and they remind us of good ways to look after our school.  We have monitors to help us to remember!
• We have our own wormery and we enjoy giving the worms our fruit peelings and watching the worms eat our fruit waste.
• We held a competition to write an eco code for our school.  There were so many fantastic entries and we have our eco code on our website.
• We organized a book swap to raise awareness of recycling and enjoyed exchanging our old books for some new ones.
• We designed and made a Bug hotel in the school grounds.  We collected materials (sticks, dead wood, dry leaves and moss) from the Wild place and used old wooden pallets for the floors.
• We converted an old playhouse and made it into an eco playhouse.
• We took part in ‘Guildford in Bloom’ and we were awarded a prize for our school grounds.
• We took part in the ‘big tree plant’ and we planted lots of small trees around the school grounds.
• We have an energy monitor in the office are which monitors the amount of energy the school uses.

Our Eco Schools Action Team members are:

Year 2 - Olive, Sam, Jonte, Michael, Poppy and Laura Year 1 - Thomas, Connor, Martha, Hannah. Sarah MacKenzie (Year 1 Class Teacher) and Sara Waterfield (Parent governor).

Our first few projects are to take part in a bug count in the school grounds, rebuild the bug hotel and to paint lots more pictures on the eco playhouse.

Green Flag Award - November 2010

The eco team talked so well to Jane from Eco Schools. They told her all about the Outdoor Learning we all enjoy, the eco playhouse, our wild place learning, the recycling we do and golden bin competitions we take part in, the wormery, the golden boot scheme, the bug hotel we made and our school energy meter!

She loved it all and so now we have the Eco Schools Green Flag Award. To celebrate we wore green!

September 2011

The eco team have been busy bug collecting and repainting the eco play house. We have plans to monitor the use of energy in the school and to make more layers for our bug hotel so we can attract stag beetles and many other creatures to our school grounds.

We had a really good search for minibeasts during our eco team meeting and we collected lots. In the wormery as well as discovering so many worms and slugs we also found 2 young stag beetles! On the hedge there were some lady birds and a jumping spider. We used magnifying glasses to inspect the creatures and as lots of the eco team had brought information books about mini beasts we had a good look at these too. We are glad that there are so many small creatures living in our school grounds. We are planning to make another layer of our 'bug hotel ' near the pond which we hope will attract even more mini beasts.

The eco team had a good time painting the eco playhouse and planting some spring bulbs.