Working with Envirogroups
Our Environmental Education team have been enjoying the opportunity to work with some of our Marlborough school envirogroups this term.
Witherlea School’s ‘Green Ninjas’ have been meeting each week to explore what sustainability initiatives the school already has in place, and to create a map of where these things are happening. They are now exploring how they can gather ideas from the rest of the students, plus teachers, support staff, whānau and the wider school community to develop a whole school vision for enviro at Witherlea. They are practising some fun activities to help everyone think about how they would like their school to be, and students will share these with teachers at a staff meeting next term.
Fairhall School’s Envirocouncil has been looking at ways to create a Green Gold walk in their school to share lots of the different actions they take to look after the environment. Their Envirocouncil came up with some plans following the Action Learning Cycle planner and have been doing some leadership activities on how to include the Enviroschools guiding principles in their next steps with the wider school.
Rapaura School’s Envirogroup are also starting on their journey to write an Enviroschools vision statement. For the plan to reflect the voice of the whole school, the Envirogroup wanted all the teachers on board and decided to present their ideas of how this could be done at a staff meeting. A great example of ‘Empowered Students’ in action! Leading up to the staff meeting they chose and practised some activities teachers could use with their classes to find out what they thought about their school environment. One of these was the ‘Word Hunt’ activity from the Me in My Environment resource, which helps children to recognise and describe the variety and diversity in their environment.
