Visit from Enviro Schools

This morning Robin came and talked to us about how we can help our school to be an amazing green space to learn in. We learnt how to look after our grounds. We wrote poetry in response to thinking about our favourite green part of HES:                                
The school is full of forest
 dark scary ahhhhhhhhhhhh!
fun really dirty
 muddy yucky
 cool!
 By Asiya

Places to play           

     Jumping

     around on

    the squares having

    a game between two

     squares having fun

with

the

two

squares.     By Nicole

I
love to
play at Dawson

How do we care for our green spaces?  We compost our  food scraps.

but the best place is the library               
reading
playing
fun
win
lose.  By Jubilee

We brainstormed together about what green space we would
like to see at our school.  We thought an outdoor classroom would be a very exciting place to
learn in.

Blast off with our Recycled Rockets

Rubbish Facts

We were astonished to learn these facts:

Nappies take over 75 years to break down in a landfill.

We throw away 22 million plastic bags each week in NZ.

There are 7 different types of plastic but we normally only recycle types 1,2 & 5.

189,000 tonnes of plastic is dumped into landfills each year in NZ.

Plastic bags (type 4) take up to 20 years to break down in a landfill.

A tin can takes 100 years to break down.

An aluminium can take almost 500 years to break down.

Styrofoam (like the meat trays & coffee cups) NEVER breaks down.

..and our favourite fact...

Recycling a tonne of paper saves 13 trees!!

Waste investigation

Room 15 along with Totara team investigated the waste from  one day's rubbish.  We wanted to find out what kind of packaging and products we throw out each day?

Out it goes!  I can see a banana peel.  Q: Where does that belong? In the compost or the rubbish bin?

We sorted and sorted .... and sorted and sorted..and sorted and sorted into 4 piles.  One for plastic, one for chippy wrappers, one for bread and one for paper!

Look how much plastic we have thrown out.  Did you know that we throw out 22 million plastic bags in New Zealand each week?