Sustainability & Garden Club

Hello everyone! 

TOMORROW - Friday 24th March

National Ride or Walk or Scoot or Catch Public Transport Day 

We encourage you to leave the car at home and ride, walk, or catch public transport to school and help reduce pollution from cars on the road. If you live too far away, you can do this for part of the way! We will join more than 350,000 students across Australia who will ride, walk, scoot and skate to school. 

Please come along and join us- there will be a coffee truck with free coffee for parents and small milkshakes for students. 

Gardening Club

It was great to have some new students in Gardening Club today!  Our first edible flowers have bloomed! Calendula are beautiful yellow and orange, daisy type flowers, with purple middles. They tasted delicious! Miss Belinda is going to bring us some other edible flowers too!

Our pak choy, silverbeet and chives are growing very slowly. Our tomatoes are lovely and  green, and we are hoping they ripen soon. 

Volunteers who can gently water, are very welcome on days other than the Thursday (we water on Thursday when Miss Belinda is here) especially while our seedlings are so small. The vegetable gardens are located just outside the library, near the Prep and 1/2 classrooms. Students are welcome to use their water bottles or just ask Mrs Boffa in the office for the key to the shed to get a watering can. Our plants would really appreciate it! 

Biodiversity Audit next Thursday

We are excited to have CERES coming to help a team of Yr 3-6 students do a Biodiversity Audit of the school next Thursday. We will discover more about the environment of our school and how we might like to add to it to make more habitat for friendly insects and animals. 

Parent Volunteers

We would love parent volunteers to help us in the garden. If you are available on either an occasional or regular basis Miss Belinda would love to hear from you. Email bnechwatal@tcs.catholic.edu.au. We meet Thursdays 10.45-11.35am. Volunteers need to have a Working With Children Check.

Nude Food - Every Thursday

“Nude food” is food that comes to school without disposable packaging – extra plastic bags, paper bags, wrappings, plastic water bottles or cling wraps. Australia is the second highest producer of rubbish per person in the western world! Unfortunately school lunches are contributing to this, with the average child generating around 30 kg of rubbish a year. We can do our part to reduce this by packing a school lunch without including any extra packaging or juice packs. Make a conscious decision to only include foods that leave no packaging at the end of the day. Put the sandwich or bread roll into a named lunchbox and use small containers for any snack foods and of course, pack a reusable drink bottle. 

And the winners are … 3/4 TR (again!) with 16 rubbish free lunches, followed closely by 5/6 FA  with 13 and then 1/2 RT with 8.  Well done everyone! 

We ask students to choose foods which create no rubbish to bring for lunch on this day. 

Some yummy ideas - a sandwich/wrap/roll, pasta with vegetables, soup, frittata or sushi, a fruit or vegetable snack, such as whole fruit, cut up veggie sticks, fruit or savoury kebab or a small salad. 

There are some great ideas here:

Healthy Lunchbox Ideas for kids. Rubbish free / nude food ideas

Have a great week everyone! Thanks for your great efforts in helping us live in a way that is kinder to our environment!

The Sustainability Team - 

Ms Belinda, Amy and Nathan