Sustainability Corner
Ripponlea Primary School
END-OF-TERM NEWS
As we approach the end of term 3, the Grade 1 and 2 students have been very busy helping in the school’s productive gardens. Last week we harvested all the end of winter herbs, greens and veggies – and enjoyed snacking on and taste-testing snow peas, Brussels sprouts and kale. We were all amazed at just how much we grew in our small garden space, and hope lots of parents and families enjoyed eating the bundles of healthy greens they took home. Thanks again to wonderful Lee for her crowd-pleasing scones.
Each Grade 1/2 class has been assigned a plot for our spring planting. All the students have had the opportunity to vote on what they would like to grow. It looks like we will have lots of strawberries, tomatoes, lettuce and beans coming up in term 4. The students were busy planting out their plots near the junior playground today, so be sure to come by at drop off or pick up and help support the student gardeners track the progress of their plantings!
ST KILDA TOWN HALL SUSTAINABILITY FESTIVAL
On Thursday the 5th of September, some students from Year 4-6 attended The St Kilda Town Hall Sustainability Festival.
Starting from Week 1 of term 3 we started to collect items for our student-run workshop, where we would be teaching kids from other schools how to make a Beach in a Bottle, for the theme ‘Our Precious Beaches’!
Once we got all the items, the junior members helped us plan and assemble our practice bottle. After many failed attempts, the Beach in a Bottle was ready! To make it we used reusable plastic water bottles, sand, water and plastic soy sauce fish containers with food dye in them to make them colourful.
We taught other students about the importance of cleaning up our oceans and the length of time it takes plastics such as bottles and little soy sauce fish to degrade, hint – it’s about 450 years!!!
We aimed to encourage kids in our community to recycle (and put the little fish inside a bigger bottle to make sure the machines can recycle them too), and to just SAY NO to plastics whenever you can.
On the day, as well as running our own workshop, we attended many others for lots of fun activities. We all learnt about nurdles, which are small micro plastics, we learnt about deforestation, fossils, seed balls and native plants and animals.
We had so much fun teaching other kids how to make beaches in a bottle and learning about sustainability at other school’s stalls.
We won the ‘Creative Upcyclers' Award and got some new plants to add to our school garden.
Thank you to the parents who came along to help!
The Sustainability Team