Sustainabilty News
Sustainability news
Sustainability Group
We welcome back our dedicated Sustainability Group Leaders Grade 5 students; Finn N, Jack R, Sassy E, Chloe B, Penny F, Lydia C and Matilda C, who have already been busy planning initiatives for our school. Sassy, Chloe and Finn attended the Resource Smart Schools Leadership Summit at CERES on the 18th of February. We met with other RSS students and learned more about the wonderful things they are doing at their schools as well as sharing our wins from last year.
Nude food competition
The SGL will be commencing the Nude food competition for 2025 and Matilda and Penny have reiterated at Senior and Junior school Assemblies what a Nude food lunch box looks like. To be successful classes will need to have only reusable containers and no plastic wrappers (reusable ziplock bags are fine). This year we hope to have a prize for the class who has the most nude food lunches over the course of the year. SG Leaders will be visiting classrooms at snack times to gather the data from classes.
Tree project
You may have noticed the seedling boxes in the playground near the basketball court. Wales Street is very proud to be one of the few schools in the state to grow trees for ‘Tree Project’. Tree Project is a volunteer not for profit organization that grows and plants trees for farms and green spaces. Farmers or landholders pay for the soil, seeds and equipment. Volunteers grow seedlings to be planted on the farmer’s or landholder’s properties. We are growing a variety of trees such as acacias (wattle) and eucalyptus. The Grade 6’s are growing Dillwynia sericea or Showy parrot pea.
Each grade level is growing a different species, and each class has planted their own box. Before planting, students learnt about why planting trees is a good thing for our environment and for our wellbeing. The seedlings will be at school until October when they will be planted on a carbon capturing farm. You can read more about carbon farming here: https://www.carboncycle.org/what-is-carbon-farming/ Hopefully we will grow over 1,200 trees!
2A planting their seeds
Resource Smart School Leaders Summit
We are Sustainability Group Leaders and we would like to tell you about Resource Smart Schools and our day at Resource Smart Schools Sustainability Leaders Summit. Wales street is part of the Resource Smart schools program which is a free program by Sustainability Victoria that helps Victorian schools to have more sustainability across the school grounds, community and curriculum, while saving resources and money for the schools. We are working towards actions that will improve our school’s sustainability and help us become a five-star school.
This term three of us from the WSPS Sustainability Group Leaders got to go to CERES to share ideas and knowledge with other schools who are part of RSS. Some of the things we learnt about was how to be waste, energy and water smart. We also learnt about biodiversity and how important it is to have many kinds of plants and animals.
One of the best things was learning how to make plant tubes out of newspaper. We planted Warragul greens seeds and have taken these back to grow in our classroom and plant in our gardens at school. Warragul greens are an indigenous plant that is very good for you. We also came up with ideas for our school to become more sustainable and worked on an action to improve the biodiversity at our school- more about this soon! Another great thing was ripping a gum leaf in half to smell and think about our connection to Country.
We had lots of fun, met other students and teachers and learnt lots of new stuff. Thank you to Toby for taking us.
Finn N, Saskia E and Chloe B
