Green Schools

National Tree Week

To these two boys, whose shoes and clothes got very dirty – ‘Thank you for planting our trees for National Tree Week’.

National Tree Week is an annual, week-long festival celebrating all positive aspects of trees in our lives and environment.  It is organised by the Tree Council of Ireland with the support of Coillte. National Tree Week took place from 3-10 March, 2013. The primary aim of National Tree Week is to encourage people to plant more trees, which we did. We planted 5 new trees at the side of our school.

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Green Schools’ Programme

The Green Schools’ Programme is run by An Taisce to raise the awareness and care of the environment amongst school children and thereby the wider community.

One of the key factors of the Green-Schools’ programme is that it is a thematic programme. This means that we work on one theme at a time and follow the 7 steps, recording everything in a plan.

The themes in sequence are:
Litter and Waste
Energy
Water
Travel
Biodiversity

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The Green-Schools programme is based on seven steps.

These steps are outlined as:

    1. Green-Schools Committee
    2. Environmental Review
    3. Action Plan

  • Monitoring and Evaluation
  • Curriculum Work
    Informing and Involving 

  • Green Code

 

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Tadgh Ryan, Briain O’Connor and Donncha O’Connor who raised our first Green Flag in 2010

Litter & Waste

Thanks to Múinteoir Eamon (who is in charge of our Green School’s Flag Programme) and our Green School’s Committee of pupils, we received the Green Flag Award in 2010 for reducing waste and recycling as much as possible. We recycle paper, card, plastic, batteries and mobile phones, etc. Please send any ink cartridges, batteries and mobile phones into school for recycling as we have collection boxes available for these.

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Energy

Barry O’Leary and Múínteoir Eamon who raised our second Green Flag in 2012

We received our Energy Flag award in 2012 and we have ‘Energy Detectives’ on the energy committee who check classrooms on a regular basis, turning off lights etc. Reports are that the teachers are the worst culprits!

School pupils in 2012

 

 

 

 

 

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Water

We are delighted to have been awarded 2 Green Flags so far, and are currently working hard and are well on our way to our third green flag, which is Water.

We want to reduce the amount of water we use.

      • We started earlier this year by recording a reading for our daily water usage and we have kept a monthly record as well.  We hope to have a yearly record at the end of the year. We can then compare this with our last year’s record for water usage. Hopefully, we will have an improvement.
      • We will need to come up with a school motto for our Water saving flag, as well as plenty more targets in between.
      • We will learn about ways to save water.
      • We hope to send home our top ten tips for water saving as we did before for energy. Perhaps:
          1. Take a shower instead of a bath. Saves a lot of water and you’re still clean!
          2. Don’t use the hose. Use a bucket instead!
          3. This is how you can save water at home and at school…
  • At the same time our water theme is going on, we need to improve on our first green flag’s target of recycling and our second flag of energy saving. So, there’s plenty of work and learning to be done!

Useful Sites

Here are some website links to help in learning about our Green Flag themes to date:

Recycling Energy Water
 NIHkids  energy-kids  water_sense_kids
sciencekidslogo3 kids-energy tap_kids
kids-recycling-zone  energy-kids3 nat-geo-water