As School Grounds is one of the topics we have been working on for our current Eco journey, we decided to get involved in a food growing project called Food for Life. Miss Brooks sent off an application for a grant to buy compost, pots and vegetable seeds in order to grow vege that wee could share with our community. We decided to involve all the children in the school in planting and growing some vegetables  and herbs that we could use in cooking so that we could share some of our produce with The Simon Community in our local area and the gardeners at The Hidden Gardens in Pollokshields. Our grant application was successful and we have planted potatoes, carrots, chives, courgettes and beans in our classrooms and in the Eco garden. These are growing well (despite an attempt by vandals recently to overturn all the plant pots with carrot seeds in them in the Eco garden) and we hope to be able to harvest our produce before the end of term and make soup which we can share with The Simon Community at a celebration event in our school. Here are some photos of our vegetables and herbs growing. Here you can see some of our seedlings growing on classroom windowsills and some of the vegetables we have planted in the Eco garden.

You may remember back in February that the Eco Committee had decided to try and tackle our litter problem by signing up to Terracycle’s crisp packet recycling scheme. This was because crisp packets are always showing up in large quantities in our litter surveys.

We started out by collecting crisp packets after playtime and lunchtime when pupils would bring their crisp packets into class and deposit them in a bag there to be collected later and taken to a central point in the hall. This wasn’t working as well as we had hoped, as pupils would forget to bring their empty packets indoors.

So we decided to put plastic bins outside in the playgrounds and position them beside the regular mushroom bins where most rubbish is supposed to go. We also added buckets for unwanted fruit or fruit peels so that they could be taken to the large compost bays in the Eco garden. Monitors were appointed to ensure the bins were put out before the morning playtime. At the end of lunchtime, the fruit bins are emptied into the large compost bays in the Eco garden and the crisp packets are taken to a central collection bin in the school hall.

This has been a more successful way to cut down  our litter.  Miss Brooks recently emptied out the large central collection bin in the school hall and stacked all the  crisp packets collected since the end of February in piles of ten packets and these were arranged in rows of ten to make counting easier. There were 1053 crisp packets in total. That is 1053 crisp packets that would probably have ended up dropped in the playground, blown into the street and swept down drains and out to sea where it would add to the plastic pollution problems for marine creatures. We also have a regular supply of fruit peels and apple cores going into our compost bays now, adding to the grass cuttings,  waste paper, cardboard and twigs which we can use in the future in our Eco garden to save money buying compost from outside suppliers. In our last litter survey we saw a drop in the number of crisp packets on the playground or caught up in bushes. The next item we want to tackle at source, that keeps appearing in large numbers in our litter surveys is plastic bottles.

Last week, P1a got busy making some bird cake to help feed the many types of birds that visit our school grounds. They mixed fat and bird seed together and filled spare mugs with the mixture. The leftover mixture was added to a large bowl. They had collected sticks from the school grounds and pushed these into the bird cake in the mugs to make perches for the birds to land on when feeding. Then the mugs were put into a freezer to harden the mixture. The mugs were hung on branches by their handles  near to  the trees where we have put up our new bird boxes to encourage birds to nest there and the  bird cake from the bowl was placed  on the grass for the birds that prefer to feed from the ground.

Primary 5 and 6 have been busy lately helping to improve our school grounds. We decided to move our wildflower patch from the position it has been in for years to grow it on fresh soil with more nutrients. We will add the compost we are making to the original site to add nutrients back into the soil there before we plant there again.

Primary 5 offered to help dig out the new wildflower patch from the grassy area in the Eco garden. First, they were given a Maths problem to solve. They had to work out how many granite edging stones we needed to go around the perimeter of the patch. They did this by measuring the edging stones and calculating their average length. Then they found the total perimeter of the patch they had measured out and worked out how many stones would be needed to fit that length. They quickly cut out the patch with the spades and laid the  stones around the edge of the patch to stop the grass from encroaching on it, then scattered wildflower seeds. We hope that this area will be a riot of colour this summer and swarming with pollinators.

The Eco Committee carried out an audit of our school grounds and found some ideas to improve the Senior playground. One thing they  found that we could do with, is  some more seating for lunch and break times. We were lucky because a building site just up the road from our school had just cut down some trees that were dying. The men on site did us a great favour and provided us with two large tree trunks for the pupils to sit on. These will be rolled into position soon and the children can sit on them.

Primary 5 and 6 have also been helping to paint some large cable spools that Mrs Rooney got for our senior playground, to serve as tables and chairs so the pupils would have more tables and chairs to eat their packed lunches at.

Our native species tree grove in the Highlands is proving to be a success. We now have 16 trees planted there. This number will grow each year as our textile recycling provides us with funds to add more trees to our grove. Hopefully, one day we will have planted enough trees to offset our school’s carbon footprint, as well as helping to make a barren area of the Highlands beautiful again and provide woodland habitat for many animals, insects and birds.

Did you know that you can purchase a tree and it will be added to our grove? They cost just £6 each, (far cheaper than in the garden centre). We hope that the whole community of St. Albert’s Primary will add trees to our grove, so that it becomes a forest over time. You can add a tree to our grove on the Trees for Life website at:

https://treesforlife.org.uk/find-a-grove/

On this page, type St. Albert’s Primary, Glasgow into the search box and hit RETURN. This will take you to a page where you can purchase trees which will be added to expand our grove to create something beautiful for the wildlife and future generations to enjoy.

Every year, the St Albert’s Primary community takes part in WWF’s Earth Hour. This year is no exception and the Eco Committee is asking you to take part this year as well, for one hour starting at 8.30 p.m. this Saturday 27th March.

Earth Hour is one of the world’s largest movements for our planet. For one hour each year, millions of people from all over the world take part and switch off their lights at home to show they care about the future of our planet. Joining Earth Hour’s switch off reminds us that even small actions can make a big difference. When we make changes in our own lives, and when we share that with others, we also inspire the people around us to change – and we help grow a movement that businesses and governments can’t ignore.

2021 is the start of an important decade for climate and nature action. This year, leaders from across the world will make decisions that will impact our futures. By 2030, nature and wildlife could be recovering all around us. We could have green jobs, cleaner air and a healthier future for the next generation. Will you send them a message that you care about nature and the future of our planet by taking part this year?

Visit https://www.wwf.org.uk/earth-hour to find out everything you need to know to take part. There you will find ideas for things to do during Earth Hour that don’t involve using your lights e.g. having a candlelit dinner, doing some stargazing or going for a walk in nature. You can even calculate your own carbon footprint on the website and join online events or download a Spotify playlist to relax with.

If you do decide to take part this year, please take a photo of what your family do during Earth Hour and upload it to your child’s class page on Teams, so we can add the pictures to our Eco Notice Board in school. Thank you.

Miss Brooks and the Eco Committee.

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.