Vision

Our school focus this year was to continue to teach our students an understanding of how food waste can become compost and to use that soil to grow several plants and vegetables in our gardens. Our hope was with the growth of these plants in the garden it would reduce the amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. We are also making our students aware of their carbon footprint by making their garbage visible to them for a week to see if we can reduce the amount of garbage we collect. We are hoping the students will compost and recycle more to reduce our garbage going to the landfill.

Action

For our students to understand composting we did a composting experiment where the students collected paper bags with food scraps and buried them into our 7 large garden beds. We purchased red wiggler worms to help with the composting experiment and when we checked back 5 weeks later the bags and food waste were gone with rich soil left over.
We also planted several seedlings including fruit and vegetable plants. The students have watered the beds continuously to show our students how things grow and hoping they will be able to enjoy some of the vegetables we grow.

Finally, we will measure our garbage collected each day for a week in all our pods by weighing each garbage bag. Then the Green Team members will give each student a compostable bag to collect their garbage over the week and each student can see what they produce. At the end of this week the Green Team will empty all the bags into a few garbage bags and we will weigh the garbage and see if students composted or recycled a little more than week before. We are hopeful that by the students seeing their waste they will be inclined to compost or recycle more often.

Reflection & Celebration

With the composting experiment the kids were super excited when the paper bags of food scraps disappeared and nice soil was created. We have loved watching all the seeds sprout, flourish and getting larger from the nice soil in our garden beds. We are excited about our garbage reduction challenge which will be taking place over the next two weeks.