Our Eco Committee includes children from each year group. We meet at least once a term to discuss what we’d like to do and the areas our school needs to work on. We have carried out various activities so far to try and make our beautiful grounds even more wildlife friendly. The activities have included making a bug hotel, planting fruit trees, planting daffodils, feeding the birds, collecting fruit waste to compost, making posters, litter picking as well as organising Eco focussed days. 

Eco Day 2021 

On Wednesday 7th July 2021, Foundation to Year 5 enjoyed taking part in our Eco day. We invited Andy Warn to come and do his 'Sounds Rubbish' music workshop with each of the year groups. This involved the children banging different rhythms on bins and buckets with tubes. Andy really kept the children focused and the children smiled throughout. Many thanks to 'The Friends' for offering to pay for this experience. When back in classes different year groups took part in various activities. Year 5 made their own natural paintbrushes and paints to create pictures. Years 3 and 4 studied the impact of the clothing industry on the environment and got creative with rubbish. They also added a 'living' roof to the school bug hotel, many thanks to Mr Golding for creating this for us as well as providing lots of things we could add to it. Year 1 and 2 studied how they could help the environment and designed their own recycling logo. We look forward to continuing to focus on looking after our planet during the next academic year. 

In June 2022, the children in Year 3 focused on a bee project. They studied the importance of bees, looked at why bees are disappearing and learned about ways in which we could help. The children made posters, painted bees, designed gardens and made some lovely bee planters out of old plastic bottles. 

During May and June 2022, the Eco Committee plus several other children who are keen to be involved have been busy planting vegetables in our garden such as radishes, tomatoes, onions and courgette. Many of the seeds were started in pots and have now been planted outside by the children. The children have enjoyed coming once a week to also be involved in the weeding and watering of plants. In addition to this, some of the children wrote to Applegarth Nursery to ask if they would kindly donate any plants and to the children’s delight, they received some plants which they wasted no time putting in a planter.  

In addition to this, we have kept some plants aside as we have an exciting plant swap event coming up at the end of June. 

During April 2022, the Eco committee took part in the Great British Clean Up within the town of Chipping Norton. Mrs Kritzinger and Mrs Austin with the help of Mrs Thomson took 10 children ranging from Year 1 to Year 6 to The Common. Here the children found a variety of litter from small wrappers to large glass bottles. They were surprised to find so much and were very thorough in their litter hunt. We spent an hour there and the children managed to fill 6 bags using gloves and litter pickers very kindly donated by one of the parents. The children were pleased with their efforts and are keen to go again, feeling like they made a difference to an area lots of people use.  

During our March meeting the children worked hard to create a suggestion box which would allow all children in the school to suggest eco improvements for our school grounds.  

In Term 1 and 2 our Eco committee for this year was created and the children worked through an Environmental Review of our school and looked at what we were doing well and what we needed to improve upon. Working through this review allowed us to create an action plan together. The areas we decided to work on as a school were Waste, School Grounds and Litter.