 Longwell Green Energy Saving
Eco Council and Eco Schools Award Update
Well done to everyone involved in helping us achieve our Silver Award. There have been many eco activities over the past year that have helped us on our journey towards sustainability and we have even more planned for the coming year.
Firstly we want to encourage all the children and their families to make an Eco Promise. You will see in the Friday Folders this week there are footprints to record your Eco Promise on. The borders of these footprints will then be colour coded so that we when they are displayed in school we will recognise the year groups responsible. By asking the children to get an adult to make a promise too we are increasing our positive effect on the environment by 100%.
Watch this space for more ways to get involved with our Eco Schools awards - next stop Green Flag!
Eco Club also decided that each class needed to have its own energy monitor so we now have Power Savers. Mrs Bowker’s son helped Eco Club by making us a song that we could use in our Eco Assembly. You can listen to it here!
You can see our Energy Display Certificate, we are not doing too badly but could do a lot better! Our target is to reduce our energy use by 2% and we are already on target to do that and could even reduce it by 5%.
Longwell Green School Garden
 Our school garden is slowly taking shape at the bottom of the field. We have a boundary of railway sleepers and some canes that will support our hedge saplings when they arrive. Eco Club applied for 30 free hedge saplings from the Woodland Trust and we are looking forward to being able to plant them to form a new habitat in our school grounds and to become a natural boundary to remind us that the garden is off limits unless we are with an adult.
Over the next month the raised beds that we received in exchange for Asda Eco Vouchers will be set up and classes will start to plant and manage their own sections.
Year 4 have begun to lay out the stones that will form part of their African Keyhole Garden. Year 4 will be planting in their Keyhole Garden instead of a traditional raised bed to compare the difference between farming here and farming in Uganda.
Whole School Composting
 We are going to make our own compost to keep the soil in our raised beds as nutritious as possible for the plants that we grow in them. This means Eco Club will be collecting up fruit waste, vegetable peelings and used tea bags in school as well as egg boxes and waste card to put into the compost bins. We could have our own compost in about 6 months time if all goes well.
Morrison’s Let’s Grow Vouchers
 We are awaiting the arrival of our raised beds that we earned through the Asda Eco-Vouchers scheme. Many thanks to everyone who joined in. We hope to have these installed once they arrive and to resurrect the school garden for the enjoyment of all the children (and some of the keen gardeners amongst the staff and parent body).
Yellow Woods Challenge: Recycle Your Yellow Pages at School
 Our Yellow Woods Challenge is our first major Eco-Schools campaign across the school and with your help it can be a huge success. By joining in we can all reinforce the message that landfills are no longer feasible and the aim should be to recycle as much as possible.
We hope you will help your children take part in our school challenge and encourage them to ask for old Yellow Pages from far and wide. Any winnings will be spent on replenishing the lunchtime Huff-n-Puff play equipment to benefit all the children across the whole school.
A huge thank you to everyone who has been out collecting Yellow Pages for us.
We will continue the collection right up until the end of term.
http://www.yellow-woods.co.uk/
  
Eco Club
Year 4 and 5 are starting a new after school club in October to help achieve the Eco-Schools awards. We are meeting on Wednesdays with Miss Flook. More news to follow as the Eco-Club gets under way! |
