This blog is brought to you by Miss Emily and her Year 5/6’s.
In term 2, our class went with Ms Eldridge, Miss Gregory and Mr Wakefield’s classes to the cinemas to watch 2040. A movie by Damon Gameau which looked at what the year 2040 would look like if we were to utilise current resources and inventions to plan for a more sustainable future. (It was a really good movie- we really recommend everyone watches it).
After watching the movie, our class brainstormed some things that we would like to change in our school community. From here, we completed a social action project in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). The project that Miss Emily gave us was to identify something in our school community or local community that we would like to change. After this we completed lots of planning and designing. We had to plan all the stuff that went with our projects including creating a costing list, who we would need to talk too, organising meetings with the correct people like Mrs Wright, Wibbo and council workers.
These are some of the sustainable things that we have implemented into our school community.
A wicking bed
A wicking bed is a type of veggie patch that waters the plants from underneath. Through a pipe you are able to fill a reservoir which means that it can collect rain water and will water the plants without too much evaporation. It has 5 layers made out of different things to help this happen. We wanted to make sure that our wicking bed was sustainable so we used recycled pallets which Miss Emily got for us from Bunnings. We pulled all the wood apart and were able to reused the nails as well. This meant that the only costs that our wicking bed had was the soil and plastic. We are really proud of what we build.
Jarrah and Ryheese
A worm farm
Our project was a worm composter, so instead of being a normal composter, it has worms in it. It has 4 layers. Layer 1 the bottom has all the worm juice that the worms produced. The worm juice is filled with nutrients so it will help plants grow. Layer 2 has the soil/bedding & all the worms. Layer 3 has the fruit scraps and the worm blanket on top of the scraps. The end result of the project went fantastic because it went how we wanted it to go. We got to our final result in about 10 weeks.
George, King and Brooke
Recycled art
For our project, we collected rubbish to make art. We wanted to take rubbish and useless stuff etc, and turn it into something beautiful and useful at the same time. Throughout this project we have had an absolutely amazing time brainstorming ideas together and creating our final product. We took something that had no use or was going to be chucked out and turned it into a beautiful, yet wacky, looking clock. The finished product is now hanging in the learning street!
Zoe and Matilda
Bottle feature wall
We proposed that the school developed a recyclable bottle feature wall. We believe the recyclable bottle feature wall has helped in many different ways. The main way our feature wall has helped is to change people’s mindsets. We have had a lot of people come up to us and say how beautiful it is, but we only used recycled materials, paint and plants. We were able to include smaller students into our project by using their handprints and talking to them about sustainability. The only cost that our project had were the plants which Miss Emily got from Bunnings for us. We are really proud of the end result and hope that the school love them and continue to work towards recycling and using plastic for good rather than throwing it away.
Holly and Tessa
Bokashi Bin
A bokashi bin is for all your food that can’t be composted like meat, cheese and everything food related that would normally go to landfill (etc). The bokashi bin takes out all of the bacteria and then you can put it in your compost bin to finish breaking it down, or you can put it on your plants as fertilizer. The objective of the bokashi bins is to limit the waste we produce and to educate people that this doesn’t have to go to landfill and to help us with our sustainability focus as a school this year.
Chase and Zoe
