The enviro-team explain what they are doing

At Positive Assembly this week the students from the enviro-team and Ms Jones explained what they are doing and reminded us that we all have a responsibility to look after and sustain our environment.

Here is what was said - written and presented by the enviro-team and Ms Jones.

"We are here to talk about our enviroschool. Our school has Silver status. The top level of Enviro schools is Green-Gold.   We are going to apply for Green-Gold status this year.

To be given Green-Gold status, we have to show that we are doing things to be sustainable and that we look after our environment.

A panel of judges are going to come to school in week 9. We will welcome them and show them around.   We will show them lots of things that make us proud of our school and  tell them what make us worthy of being a Green-Gold Enviro school.

What is Enviro all about?

·   It’s about a lot more than just picking up rubbish  - it’s about reducing rubbish in the first place (nude food, recycling, using environmentally friendly packaging and products)

·   It’s about being sustainable. This means doing things that don’t trash the planet or destroy the lives of other creatures.

·   Sustainable means not using things up. It means doing things that help nature keep being healthy so it can support us. It means leaving the world in a better place than we found it.

Some of the things we already do are:

·  Grow food in our Kitchen Gardens

·  :Care for our beautiful grounds with trees and plants that attract native birds

·  We have a composting system for our food scraps

·  We are growing fruit trees

·  We want to encourage bats to live in our school – we have a bat house in a totara tree (do you know where it is?)

·  We have rainwater tanks that collect rainwater off the roofs (do you know where they are?)

·  We now have a solar water heating panel on the roof of a very big building in our school (do you know which roof?)

·  We have a school bus which helps reduce the number of cars that bring children to school each day

·  We celebrate our school community – its cultures and foods and traditions.

· We have a nature trail and we are growing native trees to plant on it.

·   We take our lunch rubbish home and try to have nude food at school.

Our toolkit is all about sustainability:

·   We are engaged with our environment

·  We are curious about the world and the ways we can make it a better place

· We respect our environment

· We are connected with our environment  we know we are part of it, not separate from it.

· We can explain why it’s important to be sustainable and to care for our place because we are literate

We are as good as the world we live in and we are the children who will be the next adults to look after our planet.

We want everyone to think about how we can show the enviro judges that we are worthy of Green-Gold status.  You might have some things to add to our list of things we do.

We would like every class to have something to present to the judges when they come to visit. We hope you will talk about what that will be in your classes.