Happy Earth Week!

Thanks to everyone for all their efforts last Friday as we began our Earth Week Celebration a little bit early by cleaning up the capital. All together we collected 40 bags of garbage and 8 large bags of Organic Waste! Our community looks beautiful!

This Friday is Earth Day. For some ideas on how to celebrate it at home you can visit:

http://www.earthdayottawa.ca/

There are some great activities happening around our city that are free of charge! My personal favourite is free admission to the Museum of Nature in honour of Earth Day, but there are many more suggestions to check out. And remember, everyday is Earth day :)

Cleaning the Capital

This Friday our school will be participating in the city of Ottawa's Spring Cleaning the Capital campaign. Primary students will be working on our school yard while our junior students will be heading out to nearby parks to beautify our community.

Littering is a major environmental concern. It has negative effects on animal habitats, our waterways and it is a fire hazard. It costs lots of money to clean it up and it can make a beautiful place ugly. Let's do our part to make our community litter-free by cleaning up and getting rid of our own garbage properly! Together, we can care for God's creation!

Litterless Lunches

Today the EcoTeam showed our first production on litterless lunches. A huge thank you to our Eco-Superstars who helped make the video a success (my favourite part was the bloopers!). For those of you who want more info on litterless lunches, here it is:

What? Sending lunch in re-usable containers

Why? To encourage the 4th "R"...Re-Think! It is time we started to re-think the way we make school lunches. It is easy to go litterless, but it does mean re-thinking what you buy at the grocery store.

For example: - Buy the large tub of yogurt instead of tubes or individual cups. The large tub can be recycled, but the individually packaged yogurt goes in the garbage.

- Even though juice boxes can be recycled, buying one can of concentrate goes a lot farther in re-usable drink containers and creates a lot less waste.

- Cheese and crackers is a simple snack to make, and is healthier than the processed cheese that comes in the snack packs.

Just remember...leave the packaging at the store!

Earth Hour

Did you know that we are participating in Earth Hour this Friday? St. James School is an official participant in the WWF Earth Hour. You can show your support at home on Saturday night by switching off your lights at 8:30 pm. Together, we can make a difference!

Bottled Water Free Day!

Today was Bottled Water Free Day around the world! As part of our EcoSchools intiatives and to help our environment, we at St. James School have pledged to stop using single-use plastic bottles in our school. This means that as of today, we are now a bottled water free zone! Congratulations to our EcoTeam who did an amazing job at our school assembly!

Message in a bottle

In preparation for March 10th, Bottled Water Free Day, our EcoTeam wrote a letter to Mayor Watson asking him to make the City of Ottawa a Bottled Water Free Zone. We packed it in one of our new St. James Sharks stainless steel bottles - our message in a bottle was then sent to his office. Please click below to read the letter we sent:

Letter to Mayor Watson

And the Winner is....

Last week the EcoTeam conducted a taste test that put bottled water and tap water to the test. From the 30 people that did the test, 5 chose bottled water, 1 said they could not tell the difference and an astounding 24 chose tap water!!! Congratulations to tap water for being not only the better tasting option but also the environmentally responsible choice!

PS Mrs. Fitzgerald chose tap water too!