Hope you all participated in Earth Hour at home! I know in my own classroom that some of you even had special Earth Hour parties! Thanks for being so committed to the environment, it is because of your generation that we will be able to start healing the damages we have already caused!
On Feb 9th, St. James students and staff will be putting on our favourite sweaters and turning the heat down a few degrees to help WWF take action against climate change, and work toward a sustainable future.By rethinking how we use energy and how much we use, we can make a big impact on climate change. If every Canadian lowered the heat a few degrees this winter, it'd be like taking 300,000 vehicles off the road!
So wear that sweater and make your Grandmother proud!
To see the video we saw in our assembly today or to book your own Granny call, visit:
http://www.sweaterday.ca/
On December 6th, 6 members of the EcoTeam went to to EcoConference held at Sacred Heart High School. There were many other schools there and we got a chance to showcase all of the great things we have been doing at St. James to help the environment. We also got to learn about the exciting projects going on all around our School Board. We will be introducing some of the ideas we learned about in the New Year. Stay tuned for more details!
Welcome back to a new school year. This year promises to be one full of new ideas and initiatives for our EcoTeam as we strive to maintain our Gold EcoSchools status!
Woohoo! St. James is now a certified GOLD EcoSchool! The certification process recognizes a school for its annual achievement in 4 key areas: energy conservation, waste minimization, ecological literacy and school ground greening. Congratulations to all EcoTeam members, staff and most importantly all of the students! We could not have done this without all your hard work and dedication!
Today the grade 1 students released the butterflies that they have been raising. The photo shows one of the many butterflies fluttering in our St. James garden. Let's hope they find it to be a wonderful habitat and stick around! Here is an irish blessing in honour of these beautiful creatures:
Thanks to all of EcoTeam members, parent volunteers and teachers efforts, our front garden looks great! Everyone has been busy weeding, planting and watering to make sure that our garden not only looks great but will be a great habitat for the butterflies that our grade 1s have been growing. We are looking forward to their release!
Next week, we will continue continue beautifying our yard by working on our front garden! Don't forget to bring your gardening gloves and keep your fingers crossed for great weather next Tuesday!
On April 20th, we conducted our second waste audit of the year. To do this, we collected 24 hours of garbage and recycling and did a visual audit using clear bags and visual estimation. We also weighed the garbage and recorded all of our findings. All together we had 7 bags of garbage with a total mass of 1.7 kg and 3 bags of recycling with a total mass of 9.3 kg.
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!
