Our School and the Environment - By Fourth Class
The pupils of our school take a great interest in the environment and we are involved in many environmental projects at the school.
Litter School Garden Tree Planting Greenflag Composting
Spring clean Leaf bin Recycling The bird table Flowers
The pupils of our school try very hard to keep it litter free. We put all papers into our bright colourful bins which we decorated. These bins are brought out at each play - time. The caretaker burns all the rubbish at the end of the week. We have a green code for litter:
I will put litter in the bin
If I see a paper I will pick it up
I will keep my desk tidy
I will leave the classroom tidy before I go home in the evening
We have a school garden. Each class had a part of it to plant something in. We planted lots of vegetables like carrots, lettuce, radish, celery, parsnips and scallions. In the Autumn we made vegetable soup out of them. The following year we planted potato. Out of those potato we made chips boiled and mashed potato.
The reason we plant trees is because they keep the air clean and provide homes and shelter for birds and animals. Every class in our school planted a tree. Our class planted a White Beam. The other classes planted some Oak trees, Holly trees, Silver Birch, Rowan tree, and a Maple tree.
Green Flag
Our school cares for the environment. We took on the challenge of trying to reduce the number of plastic bags being used in our community. We avoided taking 11995 plastic bags from shops. We did this by bringing our own strong bag to the shop and we wouldn't take a bag for small amounts of shopping. Some people used boxes instead of bags. We were awarded the green flag. We fly it outside our school. It has a green back ground with a tree and 2 books printed on it-one blue and one white.
Our school has a composting bin. We put all our organic waste, into a yellow bin. Then we empty the contents of the yellow bin into the composter. We use a yellow bin so that it would remind us to put our organic waste into it instead of putting it into the rubbish bin. We cannot put cooked food into the composter because it will attract rats and mice. The only thing you can put in is food that once grew such as tea bags, apple cores, orange peels, banana skins, potato skins, carrot skins, cabbage twigs and grass cuttings. Bacteria breaks down the waste and turns it into soil which we will use in our school garden.
At our school we try to keep it nice and clean and we try to keep the road to our school clean .We do the spring clean now and again . We go out with gloves bags and the litter picker .We go out along the road and clean up the ditches and bushes . The Donegal county council come and collect the rubbish .We like to keep the roads near our school nice and clean.
In our school we have a leaf bin. This is a bin that we keep Leaves in. It is a rectangle shape it has four sides made of chicken wire. Every autumn we gather leaves and put them in the bin they decompose into soil which we use for our plants and garden.
We try to recycle as many things as possible. We had a compaign to cut down on the number of plastic bags used. Our class made models with left over toilet roll holders. We use cardboard boxes for projects too. If we have any scraps of paper left over we draw pictures on them.
Our class has a bird table outside the window. We feed the birds seeds and nuts. We are leaving leaves, twigs and wool in a bag on the table to help the birds build their nests. Every day lots of birds come to the bird table. Birds like the house sparrow comes to the bird table. Our teacher took pictures of the birds. We often have to refill the nuts.
Our school looks very nice in the spring because all the flowers have blossomed. Our playground looks very colourful and bright. We have different types of flowers growing daffodils, crocuses and many more.