Environment & Sustainability
News from the Chicken Coop
Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!
Thanks to the Campbell and Lausberg families for taking such great care of our school chickens over the last few weekends. We hope you got lots of eggs and baked lots of delicious goodies with them, yum! The chickens are really pleased to have all the students visiting them when they are playing in the Adventure Playground again!
Weekend Chicken Duty Roster for Term 1
Thank you to all the wonderful families who have volunteered to do weekend chicken duty throughout term 1. If anyone has missed out this term don’t worry! School holidays are just around the corner! Start thinking about what dates you would like to put your name down for and get in quick as holiday chicken duties are very popular, lots of eggs!
Please email Mel at mkerwin@sjmitcham.catholic.edu.au with your preferred dates (3-4 days if possible) if you are interested in being added to the roster. Remember, first in, first choice of dates!
Egg Lotto is returning in 2025!
The Environment Leaders will once again run a fortnightly egg lotto. All the money we make is put back into the keeping of the chickens for buying food and other resources. The first Egg Lotto draw for the year will be next Monday 17th February at assembly. There will be several dozen eggs available to win so get your $1 raffle ticket soon. The leaders will be out in front of the school on Wednesday afternoons from 3:10-3:20pm to sell tickets to parents or students.
Chicken Club
Every Friday at recess (second break) anyone can join Mel at the chicken coop for Chook Club. There are lots of jobs to do from cleaning out the water containers and refilling them, topping up feed for the weekend, refreshing the nesting boxes with clean straw, cleaning out the chook waste and adding it to the compost bins (gloves are provided!). This will eventually go on our garden beds as fertiliser. Students may also choose to just hang out and play with our lovely St John’s chickens!
We’d love to see you there!
Soft Plastic Reduction Initiative
At St John’s we all care for our environment in many ways. Every Wednesday afternoon we have ‘Clean Up Wednesdays’ where all classes clean up a designated area of the playground.
Another way we care for our environment is by reducing the amount of wrappers in our lunch boxes so that we don’t have rubbish blowing around in our playground or ending up in the growing pile of landfill.
Wrapper Free Lunch Boxes
Each day the Future Leaders keep a tally of how many wrapper free lunch boxes are in their classrooms. If lunch boxes are not wrapper free, all wrappers will be sent home.
At the end of every 2 weeks the Maths Leaders calculate which classes have the highest percentages of wrapper free lunch boxes and the winners will be announced at assembly. The two winning classes will receive one of the Environment Mascots to keep in their room for 2 weeks and they will also receive 15 class Dojo points!
Wanted- 2 Litre plastic milk cartons
If you use 2 Litre plastic milk cartons we would love to reuse them before they are recycled. The plastic cartons with a handle are the perfect size to collect the liquid we call worm juice, from the worm farms here at school. We use and sell ‘Worm Juice’ as an organic fertiliser for our veggie gardens. Please send in your rinsed and clean bottles (labels removed if you have time) to the office for the Environment Team.
Environmental Dates coming up
- Fri 28 February Clean Up Australia Day for schools
- Sun 2 March Clean Up Australia Day
- Fri 21 March Earth Hour Schools Day
- Sat 22 March Earth Hour
Thanks for your support,
The Environment Team