Vision

The Green Team is a small group of children who wanted to come together once a week to make a difference in our school, community and the world. They wanted to learn and do things connected to the environment.

Action

The Green Team met once a week at lunch. We started by talking about what questions we had and what we wanted to focus on. We made posters for recycling, reusing, reducing and refusing. These posters were hung in the hallway with our brainstorming plans. The students in the green team said that they really wanted to focus on the environment and so that is what we did. Students spent an afternoon outside in Trepanier Creek Greenway Park, painting pictures inspired by our local environment. They painted on canvases using acrylic paints. Students added a small write up explaining why they painted what they did. Once completed these were put on display and then the students took them home. Students in the green team wanted to work on gardening and learning about plants. We started seed inside (some have been planted in our beds and others will be planted by the end of May). Some of these were flowers for our front garden bed that we are converting to a pollinator friendly garden and others were vegetables that will go in our installed raised garden beds at the side of the school. These gardens are part of an intergenerational garden project with the Peachland Wellness Center. We cleaned out the front garden bed and removed some invasive plants. We moved a few things around that were just in the wrong place (not enough sun, too much sun, not enough water, too much water, etc.). We planted some pollinator friendling plants such as yarrow, coneflowers, cosmos, and Lavendar. We used our recently purchased rain barrel to collect water when it rains (we are working on getting it moved to under a drain spout on our building) our garden beds through the week. We have been measuring the water that we use in the gardens and have determined that we need to water about 1 inch in a can twice a week for the right amount to keep the gardens well-watered and not over watered. On Eart Day the green team went out and did a community clean up picking up garbage near the school. We created posted to promote and encourage walking and riding bikes to school to reduce the number of cars on our roads. We hung these posters around the school. One thing we will do in the near future is conduct a waste audit and then work to reduce the amount of garbage that ends up in the landfill. We will work on promoting recycling and composting in our school. We noticed that the amount of garbage (especially after lunch) is excessive and often things that could be cleaned out and recycled. The students want to use some of the materials found that should have been recycled and make mascots or art with it (this will happen in June).

Reflection & Celebration

The Green Team was a small group of students (usually 6-8 per week) and yet we accomplished a lot.