2011 WE ARE A SILVER ENVIROSCHOOL!

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2011  HIGHLIGHTS

At the end of the year we reflected on all the actions we had taken throughout the year, the projects we have maintained and extended and all the learning we have done to achieve these.  Our reflection group decided that we were a silver enviroschool.

ELM PARK SCHOOL IS A SILVER SCHOOL BECAUSE….

Everyone in our school is involved in working towards our whole school vision, projects on our vision map and designing our school care code.    

This year, as a result of our whole school inquiry about water, a range of actions have been explored and employed by students to conserve water and improve the quality of our waterways.  Students have included their families and encouraged and educated them through home water audits, 4 minute showers and adjusting the flush on toilets, beach clean ups and stream trips.    

With a deeper knowledge of our impact on the wider environment students have changed some of our practices and introduced more sustainable systems for our environment -

e.g. washing yoghurt pots in buckets not storm water drains

Collecting wastewater from the drinking fountains to use on gardens

Stream clean up team (Eco Warriors)

As a result of audits and monitoring in our school, students can see the progress we are making, have identified problems and initiated changes to address these.  Practices and projects begun in previous years have been continued, refined and developed to become more efficient and involve more people. Some of these are

Native tree Planting

Compost

Worm Farm

Weekly audits of litterfree lunches

Recycling paper and other waste

Shade house

  

All the guiding principles inform our learning and practices.  We have strengthened the Maori Perspectives guiding principle by gathering information about Maori world view, the language and their traditional practices around water and the environment.   The whole school visited our mountain, river and sea to make connection with places in our school pepeha and connect to our role as kaitiaki.  Our Maori enrichment students have become an expert resource in each class and introduced Matariki for us.  

We are a diverse school with many cultures, languages and perspectives and all of these bring a richness to our conversations and action planning.  At the end of the year we celebrate with our cultural concert.

Our next steps are to create an awa to record our journey as an enviroschool.

We will continue the native planting and developing this area to include a pathway and information about our trees.

Encourage everyone to bring water bottles to school.

Maintain and develop the exisiting areas 

e.g. Michael Ungerer garden

Sensory garden

Vegetable gardens

Shade house plants

Lizard gardens

Share information with our community

e.g lessons on compost and worm farming

Information signs

Movies and Blogs