We had another School Grounds Staurday Surgery on Saturday 21st March. The turn out was slim this year but we got lots of work done – with beds cleared and planted, pruning, path refreshing and a litter pick being the main activities. Thanks very much to those who helped out and watch for our foxgloves and geraniums in the coming months!
During the event…
After the event!
Eco-Schools Scotland are celebrating 20 years of Eco-Schools this year. As a school who have had Green Flag status since 2002, our pupils were asked to contribute a photo and quote to make a celebratory bunting!
Our winning quote was from S4 pupil Alexander Fraser: ‘Caring for the only planet that cares for us’ – but we wanted to share some others too! So this is what Eco-Schools means to us…
‘Doing our best not to harm the environment’
‘An Eco School should be able to take meaningful action against littering, the wasteful use of energy and disregard for the local environment and should be encouraging towards environmentally friendly pupils and people in the community’
‘Being an Eco School means that as a youth, I have the opportunity to actively participate in improving the environment through my school’
‘It means working together to fight global warming!’
‘To me an Eco School means working hard, commitment, creativity, dedication, team work and PRIDE!’
‘Being an Eco School means to me that all pupils and staff should do their part in order to make the school and community eco-friendly’
‘That we have a cleaner, safer, healthier environment’
‘For me, being an Eco School meand being given the chance to help change the local environment for the better’
Here’s to another 20 years!
S2 pupils teamed up with park rangers and volunteers from McDonalds on Friday 23 May to clean up Figgate Park. Some pupils pciked up litter, and some helped clear the flowerbeds in the eastern section of the park, collecting 110Kg of waste in total. The waste collected during the litter pick has been graphed by the Eco Team (see below).
Other pupils removed a whopping 450Kg of branches, litter and a shopping trolley from Figgate Burn. After all that hard work we refreshed with some healthy snacks provided by McDonalds and had a game of rounders. Well done to the boys’ team, who beat the girls. Until next year…
On 26th April, Porty held its annual School Grounds Saturday Surgery, with a good turn out of staff, pupils and parents all helping to spring clean our biodiversity garden. Some much-needed sprucing up included the fence being mended by our excellent committee member Mr Christie, below:
Miss Macmillan and her helpers cleared our flowerbeds, which have some growing gems such as buddleia, honeysuckle, birch (!) rosemary and primrose.
Mrs Falconer and her wee helper started our new sensory garden, which will contain plants that are soft, bright, sweet-smelling and rustling (see bamboo, below!).
We still have a long way to go. Our John Muir enrichment group will be spending time in the garden doing conservation work, including digging up some of the area seen below to plant some wild flowers. The photo also shows our elder tress, which now produce a great deal of berries that the FTT department plan to use in recipes later in the year. The CDT department also plan to make picnic benches and bins so pupils can enjoy their lunch breaks in the garden more easily.
That’s all from us for now, after two very quick updates! We look forward to holding more Saturday Surgeries in the future (always with bacon rolls and hot drinks for our well-deserving volunteers!) and also hope that parents, as well as pupil and staff, may choose to come and maintain the garden during the summer holidays, when the thistles tend to come back with a vengeance… Please comment below if you wish to come and help us – let us know when you can help out!
To update you on our Oxfam Porty Project, our shiny smartbins arrived in school in April and were installed in the foyer. The whole school was informed by assembly and school bulletin of the Eco team’s visit to Edinburgh University, where they helped to put the smartbins togather using scales, sensors and lights, circuit boards and some complex cables! This was a great experience as it gave our pupils some ownership over the smartbins. We rose to the challenge of filling each house’s smartbin with donated clothing 4 times before the Easter holidays to win a dress down day for each house. Crichton and Duddingston both reached the target of 4, Abercorn reached 5 and Brunstane filled an impressive 6 bins! Pupils who donated the most were rewarded with Amazon vouchers, as an extra incentive.
These clothes have been sent to a grateful Oxfam shop for sale, the proceeds going towards various projects to improve the standard of living and reduce inequalities worldwide.
What next? Well, we plan to track 4 of the items with GPS instruments, to fill in the gap in our knowledge between donating to Oxfam and the money raised going to the projects we can read about.
The project has been so successful that we’d like to make it an annual event at Portobello High School, allowing us to take action for waste minimisation and help a charity make the world a better place at the same time. This teaches us a valuable lesson about our role as citizens, and of course adds to our inter-house competition!
This term the Eco Team have been working on a design sprint, manufacture and trial of textile recycling ‘smartbins’. In conjunction with the University of Edinburgh’s Chris Speed and Siobhan Magee, who are researching how to increase donations for Oxfam, the smartbins have been developed to inform staff and pupils at Portobello High School how their donations will help Oxfam with their various projects worldwide, and also will add an incentive to donate, as donations will become an inter house competition with prizes.
Watch our video of our visit to the University of Edinburgh to see how we helped make the smartbins: Oxfam Porty Project.
So the greenhouse effect has become a globally renowned issue that could potentially change the dynamics of our earth dramatically. This relatively newfound concern stems from the fact that this is not an issue that only affects the climate, but also animal migration, habitat loss and the spread of desert. It could also affect the course of the Gulf Stream which would be catastrophic for the climate here in the UK, as it brings across warm water and air from the Gulf of Mexico. Because of our latitude, the climate in Britain without the warmth from Mexico would be very different from the climate we know today.
By Keyaan and Rebecca
One more thing: further to the last nite, we have learned that from the recycling of ink cartridges in the last Recycling Action Term alone we have raised £38.29 for CHAS. We are looking forward to continue to send away our ink catridges, although we are now involved in a recycling bank design sprint with Edinburgh University’s Chris Speed and Siobhan Magee! Watch this space…
Phew, it’s been a long time since we last updated! This is partly due to technical issues with our blog – our fault, sorry. For those of you who have been waiting with baited breath for our latest news, here’s what we achieved later on in 2013:
We have had a very successful session so far in the Eco Team, welcoming many new members and running assemblies to let the whole school know about our Eco-Schools events this year. At the start of the session, our Eco Committee met to discuss updating our Eco Code. As PHS has been flying its Green Flag since 2002, our Eco Code has included all the topics and become quite long! To make it more memorable, it was divided into three main themes: ‘healthy living’, ‘saving not wasting’ and ‘global awareness’. Our trusty friends in Graphic Communication set a poster competition for their S3s to design new posters to display the simplified code, and the winners received Amazon vouchers. The winning four designs (see below) have been copied and one of each of the posters displayed on each floor of the school. Thank you Graphic Communication!
We have also organised and celebrated our Eco Day of the 2013/14 session, on 4 October. This year, as we’d been struggling to meet the targets we set for the Energy topic, we decided to set the theme of the day as energy. Eco Team members led assemblies during the week of Eco Day, explaining the effects our energy use has on other countries, especially in the developing world (see below a slide from our presentation).
On Eco Day, pupils brought a donation to school and dressed in green or as their favourite animal to show support. Funds raised – £608.70 – went to National Energy Action, a charity that deals with fuel poverty in the UK and promotes energy efficiency. To show their support, many teachers signed an energy pledge, opting not to use energy in their lessons for a period, or in some cases, a whole school day. Many pupils were surprised to hear that fuel poverty is a problem in a developed country like the UK. Teachers also wore stickers designed by the Eco Team (see below Eco team members with their designs). Details of our efforts have since been published in the NEA newsletter! Portobello’s previous energy saving efforts will also soon be published in an Edinburgh Council energy saving case study document, to be made available to schools later this year.
On October 29 we had the first of our 3 Car Free/Share Days. We have a large number of staff who use public transport each day, and many who are willing to car share when possible, but we are continuing to work on this hurdle! We also had a recycling campaign involving an ink cartridge ‘recycling action term’, sending a large number of ink and toner cartridges to Recycling Appeal and raising funds for CHAS in the process (amount to be confirmed).
We have also been working in our biodiversity garden and tidying it up after the summer. Although the thistles had somewhat taken over, the moths will have been happy with that, and there were also thriving buddleia, honeysuckle and wild flowers to attract insects. This winter we hope to start feeding small birds in preparation for the RSPB Big Schools’ Bird Count in February.
What next? Well, our Recycling Action Terms continue with textiles this term. We met with Chris Speed and Siobhan Magee from Edinburgh University last term about their research into clothing recycling and plan to do a joint project together by March. Then it’ll be no time until April/May and the now annual National Spring Clean litter pick! But first, we’re working on our application for a 6th Green Flag award. We’d welcome any tips on what to do or questions on how we’ve organised our activities. Our senior Eco Team members also plan to start posting ‘Eco Bites’ on the blog, outlining what they feel are the biggest environmental issues today.
All the best for an environmentally friendly 2014!
We had a great turn out on Saturday, 13th April at our School Ground Surgery! A huge thank you to all the parents who came along to help out, the grounds look far better!
Have a look.
We have recently been sharing our progress with the rest of Portobello High School by introducing our project in the form of a presentation in house assemblies. We’ve been working in conjuction with the organisation Changeworks to help run the “lose the litter” project funded by Zero Waste Scotland. This project required us to look at the amount of litter produced by the school over the 2012/13 session and find ways to reduce it. Our extra incentives to lose the litter included a “bin it to win it” competition which was successful! This was when pupils who were witnessed putting their litter in the bins were entered into a prize raffle to win tickets to Edinburgh Zoo.
Our link with Kiurani Secondary School is developing well, with both schools involved in projects which allow pupils to share their learning and find out about each other in the process. One of these projects involves the development of the school grounds to boost the environmental awareness of pupils at both schools. Titus Mugambi at Kiurani, the coordinator of the Environment Club, has been developing a tree nursery with his pupils. During their visit to Kiurani in October 2012, Miss Bigg and Ms Gallagher helped the pupils start planting the trees around the school grounds, to provide shade and shelter for the grounds and crops, and in some cases for firewood.
Now the plans for the next reciprocal visit are underway and while there are many opportunities in Edinburgh for our pupils to raise funds for their visit to Kenya, it is more difficult for the Kiurani pupils to do the same. We are giving members of the PHS community an opportunity to help give Kiurani pupils the chance to come to Edinburgh by adopting a tree in the Kiurani school grounds.
For £15, you can adopt an indigenous moringa tree, also known as the ‘miracle tree’. These will help conserve the environment at Kiurani as their large leaves add nutrients to the soil. They can also be harvested without harming the tree, to be eaten by livestock.
For £10, you can adopt an exotic grevillea tree, chosen for its speedy growth as it takes only 5 years to mature. It is used for firewood and timber, essential for cooking and construction at Kiurani.
If you would like to help us fundraise by adopting a tree, please keep watching this page to download an order form http://portobellohighschool.org.uk/school-info/ethos-achievements/international-links, or email Miss Bigg at sophie.bigg@portobello.edin.sch.uk. Adoption fees can be paid by cheque.
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