Saint Mary's NS

This school year we began working towards achieving the first green flag for our school. In November each class carried out surveys on what was being put into the class black bins for a week. We also emptied out our class black bins to see what items could have been recycled.

In December we had our Green School's Committee elections. We elected 3 members from each of the senior classes. who all promised to work hard. We wrote and newspaper articles about the elections which were published and put on our green school's noticeboard.

In February fifth class carried out a litter survey in the yard. Students worked in groups and each group was given a zone in the yardand they had to go and count and record how many pieces of litter there were in each zone. We were really surprised at how much there was because you don't see it walking past - there was a lot stuck in the bushes and behind the prefabs.

In March we had our first Action Day. In our school we have a green day every year where we dress up in green on the day before St. Patrick's day and celebrate our culture. This year our Green School's Committee decided to take part in An Taisce's National Spring Clean on our Green Day and clean up our school. Each class was given a different zone to clean up on the day. Here is a photo of First class with all the rubbish collected on the day made into a litter snake. We hope to banish the litter from our school from now on.

In April we got new litter pickers and new colour coded bins for our yard. We began doing litter collections on Monday mornings with Sixth class. Sixth class are also volunteering to watch or monitor the bins at break time to help us to learn new and better habits. Third class are using the litter pickers after each break to collect the litter from the yard and recording the amount found in our litter log. We also ran a tidy class competition. The class who were tidiest were Junior Infants 1. Well done. We also designed Litter Awareness posters which we put on display for World Earth Day (22nd April). On World Earth day all the classes watched Wall E on our new interactive whiteboards to say well done and thank you for all the hard work.

In June we carried out Wrapper Ratings surveys in the classes to see how many wrappers were in our lunchboxes and if we can work out how to reduce them. At our summer assembly we recorded our whole school chanting our Green School's Code.