Congratulations to our amazing St Mary's Eco-Committee in achieving the official Eco-Schools Green Flag! Thanks to their passion and hard work, we are now an accredited Eco-School! The Eco-Committee is made up of members from each class, from Reception to Year Six, who have worked together this year to raise awareness of environmental issues and to put their ideas into action. This has included beach cleans, raising money for CAFOD’s Go Green Campaign, recycling crisp packets, learning about endangered animals across the school and creating a bug hotel in our nature garden. We would like to say a massive thank you to all our pupils and families for supporting us this year and for making our world a better place for the future.
CAFOD Week Refugee Awareness project. April 20th-22nd 2022
We started the week with an assembly and some of us acted out the story of the Good Samaritan.
We have also been taking an interest in the news particularly at the moment as war continues, keeping our Ukrainian and Russian friends in our hearts and learning about the journeys of the Ukrainian refugees. We discussed what we would say to them and ideas of how to help.
We had a non-uniform day to raise money and bring in donations for Ukrainian refugees and helped one of our incredibly kind parents at school to wrap toys and presents for the children struggling, which had also been donated by local businesses. It was so lovely to help in this way and we worked as a great team.
In our lessons we also considered the importance of knowing the correct definitions for those who have had to leave their homes and the political implications of this. From our research, we created posters to explain the differences between a refugee, asylum seeker, internally displaced person and a migrant.
To better understand the difficulties someone fleeing their country might face we also took part in a drama challenge in family groups.
CAFOD - GO GREEN Project Week November 1st-5th
This week, we took part in many activities for the Go Green Campaign. We started by watching the national assembly and recalled what we remember about our previous project week: ‘Eyes of the World’ and the upcoming COP26 meetings being held in Glasgow this week by our World Leaders. From this, we created a class tree of pledges for how we ourselves plan to Go Greener.
We also:
- Watched the EarthShot Documentary by David Attenborough and Prince William
- Learned about new soft-plastic recycling and in English we worked on our persuasive letter writing skills by writing our own letters for the school newsletter to persuade our families to recycle more.
- We kept a close eye on the news to find out about the pledges our own world leaders are making for a greener future to combat climate change.
- We all wore green and donated £1 for the campaign on Tuesday to raise awareness.
Throughout the week, Year 6 also planned their own class fundraising events. They came up with lots of fun ideas to put our faith into action. Each class will come up with their own fundraising idea and complete it this week. Their challenge was to work out the logistics of our events including: working out how it would work in action, preparing resources, advertising, holding the events and collecting and counting the money.
They chose 2 main events: A mini-disco for all year groups and a football challenge and raffle for years 3, 4 and 5. Altogether we managed to raise a brilliant £59.40 for CAFOD!
CAFOD - Eyes of the World Project Week September 6th-11th
This term, we took part in many activities for the Eyes of the World Campaign. We started by watching the national assembly and recalled what we remember about ‘Eyes of the World’ and COP26. From this, we created a class prayer for our intentions for the care of our ‘common home’ and support from God to live them out.
Throughout the week, we built up our knowledge of climate change and the effects of this on the poorest people like Delio in Peru and Mary in the Pacific Islands suffering. We created posters from our research in groups. We then looked at what we are doing ourselves and as a school to support sustainability, from wasting less paper to solar panels. In English we worked on our persuasive letter writing skills and wrote our own letters for our expectations and advice to the government, prior to COP26, and sent these to the Prime Minister.
We had some active fun creating our own actions for saving the planet as warm up games for PE and in the mornings and we finished up the week with our art lesson to create some stunning visual collage eyes to remind the government the world is watching their actions!
Finally, to ensure we are also keeping ourselves and our class accountable, we nominated eco-monitors in class to make sure that we aren’t wasting any electricity or paper and we voted for our eco-council representative who gave some passionate arguments for why they care for our environment.
