Enviro week at Renwick School
Ellen Theobald, co-leader of Renwick School’s ‘Green Ferns’ enviro group, wrote this article to tell us about the school’s recent Enviro Week activities.
Our Green Ferns organised a really fun Enviro Week to coincide with the Climate Strikes and the work done by Climate Karanga and George Varney (Climate Youth Action Team) at the tree planting opportunity that was offered to schools.
We also decided that we need to raise the profile of recycling within our classrooms as school systems changed and we needed to educate everyone to let them know what to do.
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- Some of the eye-catching new recycling bins
The Green Ferns ran a competition where classes were encouraged to decorate their cardboard and paper recycling bins (Thanks to Bohally for the great idea!!) and they also ran a poster competition promoting the right environmental choices. We are hoping to put these posters in our local businesses to get our voice out there.
They ran seed tape making workshops for kids throughout the school where the kids made tape using bird and butterfly friendly plant seeds to help these populations.
Making seed tape with the help of the Green Ferns
We had wheelie days where we encouraged the kids to bring their scooters/skateboards to school rather than come in the car and then the kids were able to play with them at lunchtimes – our Green Ferns supervised this.
Wheelie day!
We planted plants with Climate Karanga and George Varney in our creek area.
Planting trees by the creek
Each whanau also did a cleanup at some point during the week, either at school or in the community. We found a lot of rubbish at the Giesen Center and in our Hall Carpark where the Community Recycling Containers used to be.
Cleaning up our place
On the day of the Climate Strike our kids used chalk to write environmental messages on our walkways into school to educate our community and to get our voice out there. This looked so impressive, but I didn’t get any photos.
From this week, our Green Ferns are working on:
- Building ramps to make our wheelie days even more fun and to encourage more of our older children to come to school this way
- Building and making planter boxes with bee/bird-friendly plants
- Painting a more permanent environmental pathway at our school
- Keeping an eye on our recycling to make sure that it is being done, and being done appropriately