Sustainability @ TPPS 

We were very excited to receive a certificate and soft toy platypus named Pax from WWF Australia, thanking our Grade 5s for their amazing fundraising effort to Adopt a Platypus last term. 

Jen from WWF wrote us this letter:

Thank you so much for your beautiful message – and an even bigger thank you for the incredible effort you and your Grade 5 students put into supporting WWF-Australia! We absolutely loved hearing about the “Pass The Test For A Platypus” event – what a creative and fun way to raise awareness and funds for such a special animal. It’s so heartening to know that young people are learning about our native wildlife and taking action to protect it. Please pass on our heartfelt thanks to all the students – we’re so proud of them!  We truly hope to see you and your students involved again in the future. Please know that we couldn’t do what we do without amazing supporters like you – thank you again for being part of our conservation community.

All of our Grades 1s, 2s, 3s and 4s are enjoying being busy little bees in the vegetable garden this term. It has been wonderful seeing all their industrious effort working towards our fresh new garden bed of lettuce and strawberries. 

We hope that with extra care and attention, our new plants will grow nice and big before any wandering snails find them! 

The students rotate through many jobs such as watering, weeding, sweeping, planting, composting and snail hunting. 

In the classroom, the Grade 1s learned about pollinators and had a great adventure looking for them in the sunshine.

The Grade 2 students are embarking upon a study of the local blue-tongued lizards, so that we can learn how to make them a lizard lounge somewhere in our school. Xavier and Dan made very clever blue-tongued lizard puppets!

In Grade 3, it’s been all about the birds! We found out that rainbow lorikeets have bald babies who they raise in tree hollows. So many different creatures use tree hollows as their habitats, so it is very important to keep areas in our suburbs where there are fallen trees, hollow logs, leaf litter, and old or dead trees with holes in them.

Grade 4 have been learning about North, South, East and West, and we took advantage of a sunny morning to use the shadows to find East and West. 

We hammered stakes into the lawn and marked the end of the shadows they made with a pile of pebbles. After 15 minutes, we returned to find the shadows had moved. 

We marked the new shadow with another pile of pebbles and drew a line between the two collections. This line showed the path of the sun from East to West. 

After all that hammering in stakes, we realised that we could have just used the shadows from the footy goal posts!

The hens were very pleased with their visitors who offered some delicious leaves from the vegetables in the garden last week!