Garden and Sustainability Club
Garden "Ingrid and I have been working in the veggie garden the past few weeks getting garden beds filled and mulched, some seedlings planted and tepees up. It has been wonderful to see the kids enthusiastically getting involved and helping in the garden in their recess break on a Tuesday morning. There are some great gardeners in the making! If anyone has any seeds or seedlings they would like to donate or, if they would like to help in the garden, please come along first thing on a Tuesday morning." Laura Owen Mud Kitchen Sustainability Club We have a Sustainability Book in the reception area and we would love to hear your thoughts/feedback. The Sustainability Club began by looking at composting. All Paynesville Primary School class rooms now have a compost bin for food waste. The children have had discussions about what can and can’t go into the compost and why it is important. When food waste sits in landfill it creates methane which pollutes our atmosphere. On the other hand, when we compost food scraps they can, with time, be used to help our plants in the veggie garden to grow. Rebecca Lamble, the Resource Smart Schools facilitator, came to Paynesville Primary School in March to help do a waste audit. The Sustainability Club conducted a mini ‘war on waste’, measuring the amount of waste in the school bins and sorting one of the bins to assess what our main waste materials are. The kids did an amazing job given that it was quite time consuming and smelly work! Our results showed that by weight:
We are hoping that having the compost bins will eliminate our food waste from the main bins and then we can focus on developing strategies to reduce our other waste materials. COMPOST RECIPE: Nude Food Challenge
During our waste audit, we found that general waste was our biggest contributor to school waste in the bins outside the classrooms. There were a lot of zip lock bags and plastic wrappings from sandwiches and other lunch box items. To address this issue the Sustainability Club are interested in introducing a Nude Food Challenge on Tuesdays in Term 2 (starting week 2). Nude Food is food that has no packaging or plastic wrappers. The Nude Food Challenge encourages children to try and have a lunchbox free of waste. We know that this can be daunting for some people, so we will be sharing ideas each week in our Newsletter to help families who would like to participate (participation is not mandatory). It does help to have a bento box but you can also use little containers in a lunch bag too - just use what you have. It doesn’t have to be hard or expensive. You can also use beeswax wraps for sandwiches instead of zip lock bags and you can usually get these inexpensively from the school office. Nude Food Ideas:
If you have any items to add, please put them on the Paynesville Primary School Information Hub on Facebook or put a message in the Sustainability Book in reception at school. It's so great seeing the kids becoming so conscious of reducing waste at school. If you’re interested in other practical ways of reducing waste and saving money, you might like to check out the Women Against Waste facebook page. |
