How To Make Your School More Eco Friendly
This article is not really to tell you how you make the actual school building(s) more eco friendly and energy efficient but more so to inform how you can creatively engage the children, staff and parents in promoting sustainability and fostering a keen knowledge of all things “green” within an educational environment. You need to be able to create the perfect outdoor classroom.
The key word here is engagement: “Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me and I may not remember. Involve me and I will understand”. There are numerous websites offering free downloadable resources on this subject matter but in order for children to meaningfully make the transgression to a low carbon economy in the future, they need to be able to fully comprehend the issues by actually being involved in them. And in a fun way.
So it would be best to tackle the big four eco schools issues – namely renewable energy, bio-diversity, re-cycling and growing/healthy living
Renewable Energy
Children need to understand how carbon neutral energy is created from the sun, wind and water – so an idea would be to have a mini wind turbine and solar panel packaged system installed within an outdoor classroom whose main purpose would be to serve as an educational tool rather than an alternative power source for the school and its everyday activities. This could then be connected to an energy monitoring board with power sockets so that the children can see how much power is being created from these items and thereby datalog this information for further course work. The power sockets can then be used to power up items such as laptops, visualisers, tablets etc so that children can actually appreciate using green energy created by the sun and wind as a power source for their outdoor learning exercises rather than just plugging straight into the grid.
Re-cycling
We all know that we should re-cycle household items but within an educational context, what about creating a den which is made entirely out of recycled items which children can bring into school – for example an “igloo den” made out of re-cycled plastic milk cartons. Or a water dam feature which demonstrates how water can be re-cycled time and time again and create hydro-electricity
Growing and Healthy Living
A lot of schools now have dedicated planting areas but if you wanted to extend this feature out, you could add in mini greenhouses and a school “shop” whereby the children can actually sell the product they have grown to the parents of the schools.
Bio Diversity
You can literally start with a simple bird, box and insect nest habitat but if you wanted to study Mother Nature in more detail, you can add in nature watch retreats made out of willow for example and mini ponds so that the children can go pond dipping and study the abundant pond life they find. Wild meadow gardens are also a nice, simple and cheap feature to add.
For more information, please contact Simon Fearnehough on 01865 858982 or email: simon@hideouthouse.com
The Hideout House Company Ltd
http://www.hideouthouse.com/eco/