Sustainability 

Wildlife Warrior Excursion

Last Wednesday, the Wildlife Warriors from Grades 4-6 were fortunate enough to go on an excursion with Mrs Smith to visit two other schools and learn from their sustainability practices. The two schools that we visited were Croydon Hills Primary and Mount Waverley Primary. We went to these schools to learn about how sustainability is used and some things we may be able to implement in our school. We began the day by journeying to Mount Waverley Primary School and finishing with a trip to Croydon Hills Primary School.  

At Mount Waverley Primary School they had a very wide variety of recycling and sustainability solutions, including buckets under the drink taps to catch excess water to feed the garden beds,  and giving each class a job to do, for instance, the year 6’s did a program called KTK (Kids Teach Kids), meaning that they would go around to other year levels to teach them about the ways that they were using to use sustainability, the year 1’s and 2’s had the job of emptying the water buckets into the garden bed when they get too full, etc. The biggest thing that we took away from the excursion to Mount Waverley was the difference in the number of ways they were using recycling in the schoolyard on a daily basis, they, unlike us have a number of bins in the classroom, for things like tins, juice boxes, food scraps, paper, and of course general waste. Things like the food scraps were given to the worms, slowly turned into mulch and spread on the gardens. One interesting fact I took from the informative outing was that at Mount Waverley they had a lot of tar put in their school, killing almost all of their oak trees. They decided to rip the tar around the trees to save them, showing that plants are important to the ecosystem.  Everyone’s favourite by far about both schools was that each school was home to a number of chickens, Mount Waverley with five and Croydon Hills with ten.

Croydon Hills Primary School also had a wide variety of sustainability savers to add to our school that we may consider. Starting with, they had their own garden that students were able to eat from at all times. All the excess food scraps went into the compost tumblers which you rotated and mixed to create fresh, clean and usable soil in three months. When they get muddy ovals that are not able to be used like Kalinda has experienced in the past years, they are about to put in a man made creek without water in it so the water from the oval and surrounding areas can leak out the water ro make a creek and take  our the remaining water that ,makes hard to play on. As many people may know Croydon Hills has chickens, ten beautiful chickens that they give food scraps to and they make manure that they put into the compost. A lot of Croydon Hills sustainability practices they get from grants from the government as a way of saying I want to care for the environment. One thing that we learnt from the science teacher at Croydon Hills is that the more plants we have in the school ground the less water and the less Mr McClare and Mrs Hopkins have to get their wellies on.

Over the past few years at Croydon Hills they have done multiple things to care for the environment as small as turning off the lights, to putting trees in the land. 

We hope we have inspired you and are looking forward to installing some of their techniques and making our school more sustainable. While we are here, we will announce the prize for Nude food Wednesdays. The class that has had the least amount of rubbish over this term will get icy poles as a prize. 

By Pippi T & Helaina W

Nude Food Wednesdays

Starting from Week 1 of Term 3, we are introducing Nude Food Wednesdays!

What this means is that on Wednesdays, we would like to see everyone coming to school without any packaging, plastic or paper that is single-use in their lunchboxes or bags.

 Our Wildlife Warriors will be reporting to the Sustainability Leaders a tally of everyone who participates each recess, and the class that has the highest percentage of students participating in rubbish-free lunches will go into the draw to win a prize at the end of term! 

Why Nude Food Days? 

Bringing rubbish-free lunches to school means that all plastic and paper rubbish items are disposed of safely at home. At school, we see lots of chip packets, paper bags, muesli bar wrappers, etc., ending up in the playgrounds and around the school. Recently, these have been attracting many birds such as Ibis’, harming the local wildlife and causing the school to look and feel unclean for the school community. We want to ensure that all rubbish is being disposed of responsibly and the best way to ensure that happens, is for it to be done so at home. This is just one step forward in helping our school to be a more sustainable, clean, and safe place for all. 

So, get your containers ready! 

Thank you so much for your commitment to keeping our school clean!

The Sustainability Team 

Mrs Smith, Mrs Bulled, Mr Todd, Issy and Layla.