Central Otago Enviroschools Workshop - June 2010

With the success of the Central Otago Hui under my belt I felt it was time to step up and run the yearly Central workshop too. As usual I was nervous as, I wasn't sure if my programme was going to hit the spot, but thanks to some amazing help I think we got there.

The main subject was action planning. We've been doing things the Enviroschools way in Central for the last 3 years and I thought it was about time to focus a teacher workshop on planning the action. Fresh from the action competence workshops at the national hui the week before I was more inspired than ever.

To try to put things in context I chose the 5% Edible project to act as an example project. If you've been fortunate enough to avoid me prattling on about this submission I've made with some other cool people to our council, you can read all about it here.

After some introductions to new faces and contacts, we got stuck into the work.

We tried something new for the Central crew. Top of the mind. What exactly were you thinking about when you walked in the door, doesn't have to be enviroschools based at all, we're just nosey buggers and want to know what it is that you're all thinking about. And the top three are;

• Reports! That was the topic of the day for sure
• A feeling like we've done heaps but are now stuck in a little rut, how do we get out of it?
• New schools and new staff, how do we manage the transition?

Jinty ran an awesome session on linking the global issue of climate change to local projects / issues. Splitting into 5 groups, each group was assigned one of the enviroschools' theme areas. The task was to brainstorm how climate change becomes apparent locally within our theme area. Below are the results. I've uploaded these pics as massive versions, so click on the image to see it full size so you can have a good read.

As we all know the Action Learning Cycle is central to any Enviroschools action project. I've seen it heaps, loved seeing the new blank version but how much have I actually applied it to real life projects? A little but not enough. This is one of the reasons I chose 5% Edible as an example project. As part of me presenting the idea to council I wanted to have a better idea of how the project could develop, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to do one piece of work to fulfil multiple outcomes, that's all good in my book. After describing the project as briefly as possible I worked through the custom ALC I made for 5%.

I also wanted to reintroduce the 5 guiding principals of Enviroschools. If we are to carry out a sustianable action then we should have elements of each of these within the project. Therefore it seemd like the perfect opportuntiy to pull my planning apart and find how each guiding principal is supported within 5% Edible.

After we had some extremely strong coffee, great bread, muffins and dips it was time to get back into it again. Familiar with the theme areas, guiding principles and the ALC it was time to introduce some scenarios. We have 5, one for each theme area. The task now was to look at the scenario and use the tools we've learnt to put together a plan for an action project that could solve the scenario.

Living Landscapes 

A fruit tree near school is overflowing with fruit. The children have noticed that it is a waste having the fruit lying around. It is on public land. What could you do in term 2 to turn this situation into a community action project?

 Water for Life

It has been reported in the local paper that water usage in your community is extremely high. The council is currently looking at installing water meters using cost as a deterrent to using water. This has been discussed with the students as part of their daily news and they believe that they can help reduce their communities water usage.

 Precious Energy

The recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has really brought the issue of oil dependant travel to the students attention. Many of them come to school in their parents cars with a number of the seats empty. They would like to reduce their dependency upon oil based transport but feel it would be so much easier if we could all have a go together, not just for getting to and from school but for all of our short journeys around town.

Ecological Buildings

As part of the new community garden project it has been identified that there is a need for a potting shed. One of your students has been looking at the price of buying one from the local hardware store and believes that they could do a deal with the community gardens to design and build a shed using materials from the local recycling center. The difference in cost will be given to the schools sustainability fund by the community garden.

Zero Waste

After learning about recycling in class your students have identified disposable coffee cups as a problem. They now know that these cups aren’t recyclable as paper or cardboard yet that is where the majority of them end up, causing problems for the local recyclers. They would very much like to tackle this issue and work towards having a disposable coffee cup free town. 

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We closed off the afternoons mahi with a session about getting ourselves out of the rut and sharing a few ideas of projects that have been successful in school. 

 

There was discussion about integrating ES work into more of the other school life. Jenny and Jinty have a document linking the DARE programme and ES for instance. Have you considered learning assemblies where you invite parents along to find out more and want to become involved in action projects.

Glenorchy have had a great success in sending some of their students to community board meetings, what an amazing learning experience that would have been for them.

One great suggestion was to use blogs. I'm 100% into this and also understand the commitment that is needed to keep them going. I think it's worth it and we can start to use the technology we have available to us for free. Perhaps we should cover this more in our next workshop?

Reflection 

As everyone in with enviroschools knows we like to have a process of reflection at the end of everything we're doing, sometimes we have a few in the middle too, just to check we are on track. One of my favourites is the H form. Draw a rugby post on a piece of paper, the cross bar is an overall indicator of how good the event was, above the posts some popcorned ideas about the workshop, to the left the things you don't like and to the right the stuff you loved. Beneath the cross bar all the things you'd like to see happen next time round.

The scoring was extremely favourable with the average being in the 7 -8 out of 10 region, so I reckon we did get the content right. 

Next time we'll keep the introduce yourself session a little shorter and perhaps we can see if we can host the event not in the middle of report writing.

The next workshop should also be accompanied by a tour of the host school. This is making me wonder if you would like another workshop held in mid to late term 4 this year. I doubt I'd be able to get any teacher relief funding for it, but if you were willing to come for free I've a feeling it could be arranged, just please email me and let me know you are keen for it. It would also be useful to know any summer camp dates as early as possible so we can avoid that extra stress.

The activities were very popular, but next time we need more case studies. Do you have time to write one? Would you like some help writing it? Do you want me to write all of it for you? Case studies are really useful not just for us here in Central but also to show the rest of the country and world the fine work we are doing here.

In a nutshell, I think I've covered everything. I'd like to say thank you to everyone who came and made this such a success. Seeing everyone get into the work, network and share their success and failure stories made for an amazing afternoon.

Term 4 next one???? Let me know.......

Queenstown Primary Enviroschools 2009 Open Day

At the end of last term Queenstown Primary held a fabulous open day to showcase the work the whole school has done over the last year as part of their commitment to becoming an Enviroschool. Now it's just occurred to me that I've given two talks about the day but neglected to write a blog posting about it.

So, shall we cast our minds back to mid December 2009? It was a super hot day, gorgeous blue skies and Queenstown Primary was buzzing over the fact that our Mayor, Clive Geddes, was about to turn up to learn about what QPS has done about becoming more sustainable.

 

So many things really impressed me during this visit, I shall try my best not to go overboard on the descriptions, hopefully the pictures will tell a thousand words. The Kapa Haka group performing to the whole school was the first really impressive thing I saw. You guys were awesome!

 

The tour I was on started with the Middle syndicate. Yes, you heard that right, a tour, we had guides from the one of the senior classes and they certainly knew their stuff. I know these middle syndicate classrooms pretty well now. I've done lots and lots of work with them this year, particularly concerned with worms and worm farms. The middle classes have been looking at their organic waste, monitoring it, designing systems to cope with the volume and type of organic waste they have to deal with each day.

During the investigations it was soon realised that whilst worms are pretty good, they are indeed a little fickle. Thankfully a few teachers in school have chickens at home, so a very simple two bin system has been set up. One bin goes home to the chickens and the other is processed for the worms in school.

 

One of the interesting facts we learnt about worms was that they do not have teeth. Therefore it is very helpful to them is the food they are fed is mushed up. Enter the mincer. Rather cleverly mounted on a large sheet of wood the mincer takes all the worm food and minces it up into a very tasty pulp for them to enjoy. You can see from this pic that it's a great fun job to do at lunch time.

We have one of the QLDC sponsored worm farms on site in the middle playground. But are these students happy with a regular square box for their worms to live in? Of course not......

The Enviroschools kit has so many tools to help our students design solutions for a sustainable outcome. I've done a little work with the middle syndicate using these tools. The design and project planners from the action section of the new kit are just brilliant. In no time at all the students have started asking themselves questions about what they need to know in order to make good choices about the design they want. As you can see they've looked into a few different types.

One of the most ingenious designs they've constructed is the worm tube. We saw a YouTube video about it ages ago and some of the students have adapted it to fit their needs at QPS. Essentially you take a length of old drainage pipe, drill a few holes in the bottom, bury it in your garden to cover the holes. Put in some worms and then some food. The worms eat the food in the pipe, then burrow their way into the garden to lay their vermicast within the soil and roots of the plants growing above. Ingenious. These students have invented a way, using an old ice cream lid, to put in a tray to allow the worms to sit above the garden when it is time to move the tube.

The other middle syndicate classes have been looking at beautifying their school. One project has been to create a mural for the wall outside one of their classrooms. They have looked into the story of Lake Wakatipu and between them, created a mural made of various panels designed by different students to illustrate the story. There was a fairly large unveiling of this panel a few weeks previous to the open day, where the kapa haka group did a fantastic performance and the students involved in the creation of the mural explained what it all meant to each of them. All of this was on show inside one of the classrooms.

 

  

One of the senior syndicates has looked at water, where it comes from, how we consume it, how we can conserve it and also how it is seen and dealt with in other parts of the world. One of their classrooms was decked out with heaps of information that they'd found out. There were various experiments going on demonstrating what normal everyday household chemicals could do to our water supply.

 

 

There was also heaps of information available about the visit we paid to Mt Grand, the water purification plant in Dunedin, on last years Otago Regional Enviroschools Hui.

We then moved onto the junior syndicate. Boy oh boy, have these guys been busy. They have fully embraced the concept of 'Zero Waste'. They started off with a waste audit to get information about the types of waste they generated. Now that they knew what they had, they caould do something about it.

It was generally food packaging that was the problem. Which foods did it come with and could they still get the same food but without the packaging? Well it seems like you can.

After some rather mammoth counting exercises these students identified how many large packets of chips they needed to buy each week so they could put them in reusable containers to bring to school each day. Still having the same amount of chips as you get in a small packet, but without the waste.

Can you make muesli bars at home and bring them in in baking paper? Of course you can. They took a visit to the recycling station out at Frankton, where the students just loved seeing what happened to their recycling once it left school. It's so good to be able to see where it goes and confirm that making sure everything is nice and clean does make a difference.

 I even heard Mrs Walker asking Mr Weston if it would be possible to remove their rubbish bins from the junior playground as they didn't use them any more. Isn't that amazing? Well done everyone!

As we moved through the junior department we found some paper making going on. It's one thing sending your paper to be recycled, but a whole other, way more fun thing to make some paper yourself at school. You can make some pretty cool cards from the paper you made too.

 

Finally we found some students from a senior syndicate who had been looking that their school and coming up with some inventive ways of changing it. where could they put playgrounds? Where  would be good for a vege garden? What is reasonable to change and what should we leave? One of the best ways to get your idea across is by using a well constructed model. The ones we saw were amazing, apparently though I'm too big for the zip slide.

 

So there we have it, QPS's Enviroschools work for 2009 in a nutshell. I'd just like to thank all the students, teachers and other staff there for making working with them so much fun last year. In particular though I'd like t ogive some special thanks to Mrs Walker and Mrs Gray, who have done some outstanding work at school to make all of this happen. Well done everyone!

Reuse - Queenstown Primary and Southern Lakes Christian School

Last week I delivered the first of the EERST Zero Waste Education modules. Myself and the year 3's from Queenstown Primary and the year 3 & 4's from Southern Lakes Christian School had a fantastic time discussing all the ways we can reuse our stuff.

The idea behind this is that we buy less and throw away less. We have some great discussions about our stuff and what to do with it once we have used it for it's original purpose. I'm in class for four lessons on consecutive days and we have a range of activities to do from the workbook. The culmination on the final day is for every student to make either a desk tidy or piggy bank of of what would have been waste in the past. The only rule is that we cannot use anything new.

I was blown away with all the great creations we made, have a look at some of the awesome pics below, I'm sure you will be as impressed as I am. If you would like to book me to come to teach some of these modules at your school please email me, simon@wanakawastebusters.co.nz

Check out Room 23's blog and see their take on the Reuse module, well done guys, such great work!