Celebration for Success

Congratulations!!!!

Good news everybody.  We have received an email to let us know that we have been successful with our Interim Green Flag application.

This means that we can continue to fly our Green Flag. 

Our Green Flag Award and Certificate will arrive in school in 2-3 weeks. 

Well done to everyone who has, and continues to support our Eco work at Dalreoch.

Design a Litter Sticker Competition

We have suggested a design a Litter Sticker Competition as part of our litter action plan.

This is a copy of the letter we gave everyone in school.  We would like to be able to use as many designs as possible on our stickers.  We want everyone to be included in our positive litter reward system.

Dalreoch Eco Business Group Competition

We will be giving out stickers to praise children who actively use our litter and recycling bins and keep our school clean and tidy.

We need your help to design our litter stickers.  Your design should show a picture of what to do with litter and/or show a positive Keep Our School Litter Free type slogan. 

If you are interested in designing a sticker, please complete the box below and return to the poly-pocket on the Eco Wall by 28^th February 2017.

We are excited about making our new stickers from your designs.  Good Luck everyone.

Eco Business Group

Eco Week March 2017 Plan

We are all looking forward to taking part in our Eco Week which begins on 6th March. 


Our main focus is on surveying food and packaging waste produced in the lunch hall. 

What do we do with our left over lunch?

How much food do we waste?  Why do we throw it away?

What packaging do we throw away?  Can it be recycled?

We will survey food and packaging waste over Eco Week.  The results will be shared with the whole school during our assembly.  We want to work together to reduce this waste in school... and at home. 

Biodiversity

Each class will choose a selection of seeds to prepare and sow indoors this week. 

Hopefully these will be ready to transfer to a cooler place by the Easter Holidays.  When we come back in April the seedlings should be ready to plant in the garden.  We will choose some of our seeds to help animals and insects who may need shelter in the spring time.  This will help us support life within our school grounds.

Litter

Watch this space and our main blog for details of our Spring Clean-up.  We hope to have this organised to take place by the end of March.  We will be looking for volunteers to help, so if you can help let us know. 

Litter update

The Eco Committee have set up a new litter warden rota.  Two representatives from the committee spoke to the school at assembly to make sure that we all work hard to keep the school free from litter. Each class will take turns weekly to be litter wardens.  The rota is displayed in the cloakroom along with gloves and a yellow coverall.

Charlie the janitor has been asked to take out our Eco bins for us.  We need to look again for litter hot spots and ask for bins to be moved closer to these areas.

Remember to put your litter in your pocket or the bin!

Eco Action Plans

Here are our Action Plans.  We hope to achieve all our actions by the end of 2017.

We appreciate your support through helping with our activities throughout the year.

We update our plans throughout the year to help us plan our next activities and to monitor our progress.

Litter Action Plan

Biodiversity Action Plan

Food and the Environment Action Plan

If you have any suggestions to help us achieve our targets, please let us know.

Space Seeds

Primary 5, 6 and 7 were doing Space as their topic when an opportunity arose for them to investigate seeds that had spent some time up at the space station.

We waited eagerly for the seeds to arrive, then we came together to start planting the seeds.

We didn't know if we had the actual seeds from the space station or if they were the control seeds. We were curious but wanted to make sure that the seeds germinated.

We hoped that we had created the correct habit for the seeds to grow.  The weather had changed and our classrooms were very hot, so we had to make sure that we kept the soil moist.

Tray 6 seeds have started to grow.

Unfortunately due to the Easter Holidays and the hot weather conditions our seeds didn't make it.  We submitted our information to collate with all the other schools around the world who were also taking part in the experiment.

We need to remember to consider all possible weather conditions and the time of year that we are planting our seeds to ensure that they have the best possible environment to grow to maturity.

Primary 1/2 Investigate

Primary 1/2's topic is Zog the Dragon.  Zog lived in the countryside near a castle where a Princess lived.  Zog went to school outdoors and Mrs Dragon, his teacher tried hard to teach Zog and his classmates how to fly and be real dragons.  Zog was a friendly dragon and he didn't want to be frightening princesses, so when the Princess was captured by the other dragons, Zog helped her escape.  The Princess liked the dragons and wanted to stay and help keep them safe. The Princess wanted to be a flying doctor.  Zog helped to fly her around their environment to make people better.

Children from 1/2 went out into the school grounds to look for things that lived there.  They were sad when they found human and tree litter as they felt that this spoiled the look of the environment.  Most of the litter had been blown among the trees because our school is at the top of a hill and we quite often have high winds blowing here.  The children wanted to investigate litter and look for ways to help everything that lived in the forest area and around the school grounds.  They collected lots of litter and sorted it into human and tree litter.  There were lots of different insects living on the twigs and leaves that were collected.  The children looked at these through the class microscope and the children sketched some of the insects and learned about different species and where they like to live.

The tree litter that was collected was used to create a cave area for our Zog display.

Here are some photographs of us working and learning together.