Every year, as part of our Eco Schools work on Biodiversity, St. Albert’s Primary takes part in the Big Schools Birdwatch. This is a great activity to do as it provides ornithologists and scientists with valuable data from all over the country about how native species of birds and other creatures are surviving the winter and climate change.

This year due to most of our pupils being at home due to lockdown, we did things differently and we took part in the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch instead. The staff, pupils, parents and Mrs Harker, our Head teacher all joined in between the 29th and 31st Jan 2021 to watch the birds for an hour and make a note of the numbers of each type of bird they saw. They submitted their results to the RSPB online and sent some photos which you can see below, of them taking part and what birds they saw. If you are interested, you can check out the results of this year’s Birdwatch on the RSPB website to find out which birds are doing okay and which ones might need more support to help them to survive.

We have been thinking recently about new ways to tackle our litter at St. Albert’s  Primary. We undertake regular litter picking activities in our school grounds and in two streets we have adopted to the front and back of our school to try and tackle both the litter that is dropped in our playground and the litter that blows in from the streets, but our grounds are still not entirely litter free.

We have decided that we need to tackle our litter problem at the source and that means we need to make sure that we are not producing litter in the first place. The way forward with this is to make sure that we are not taking sweet wrappers out into the playground, so when pupils return to school after lockdown, we have decided to implement some new ideas. We need our  pupils who bring a packed lunch to bring a waste free lunch to school. This week, pupils have been asked to research some information about how you can make a packed lunch waste- free as part of their home learning so they understand what that is and why it is better for the environment. We will be asking parents to ensure that packed lunches will be waste free from now on.

We have also signed up to a crisp packet recycling scheme with Teracycle, a great company that can reuse crisp packets to make other new items, such as blankets for homeless people. We will be asking pupils to bring their crisp packets in at the end of playtime and put them in a bag in class. These bags will be collected at the end of every week and emptied into a collection box in the school hall. Every few months we can take the crisp packets to a local collection point where they will be uplifted and taken away to be processed.

We want to ensure that sweet wrappers, which are always a large part of the litter in our grounds, are not taken into the playground either and one idea we have  is to ask parents to take play pieces out of the wrappers and put the play pieces into  the children’s lunch boxes where they can be stored till playtimes, perhaps wrapped in something more environmentally friendly than plastic. As we go forward with these plans, we will monitor what changes that makes to the litter in our grounds through litter surveys.

As part of our Eco School’s work on the Biodiversity topic,  the Eco Committee planned to add more wildlife homes to our school grounds. We have so far purchased a hedgehog home, a bat box  and we have more bird boxes which we are going to re-paint and put up on trees around our grounds.

Here you can see a picture of our janitor putting up the bat box on a tree with some help from pupils. We had to consider carefully where to site this as bat boxes should ideally face south and should not have fences or  branches in front of the opening to obstruct the flight of the bats when they emerge.

You can also see some of our Eco Committee painting pallets yellow. These pallets are going to be used to build a bug hotel in our Eco garden. We chose yellow as it is a colour that attracts insects. Our bug hotel will be sited near our wildflower garden and will hopefully  provide shelter for a wide variety of insects, perhaps even some pollinators which will be great for our  apple and pear trees and the other plants and flowers, fruit and vegetable plants that we grow. It will have pipes, canes, bricks with holes through them and straw added to make homes where insects can live.  You can also see our new hedgehog box, which we will site in a quiet corner of our grounds. This one has an inner wall with an entrance at the end of a passage to protect the hedgehogs from predators. Hopefully it will have a new resident soon.