Eco Awareness Week

More than 40% of Co2 emissions
are the direct result of
the actions taken by individuals

Week commencing 14 April we will be launching an Eco Awareness Week in school, where there will be something different happening in school each day.

On the Monday we will be kicking it all off with a ‘Make a Pledge’ day. We will be in Mall asking everyone in school to make a pledge for how they can reduce their Carbon Footprint for that week )and hopefully even longer). There will be lots of suggestion such as:

√ Change your light bulbs to low energy ones
√ Turn off the light when you go out of a room
√ Turn all appliances off at the wall after use
√ Boil only enough water for your drink – don’t fill the kettle right up
√ Turn off your mobile phone charger as soon as the phone is charged up
√ Only buy food from Europe, reduce your food air miles
√ Don’t buy food containing palm oil
√ Recycle cans/plastic/paper
√ Check everything is off in your classroom at lunchtime and at the end of the day.

There will be a free treat for everyone who makes a pledge, so start thinking about what you can do and come and see us.

If you have any other suggestions for what we can all do to reduce our Carbon Footprint, then add your comments here.

Everyone's going green...

It may be fashionable at the moment to go green but even if companies and corporations are doing it for the publicity, then that's ok - more green is good green!

Check out this series of America's Next Top Model. The green theme is raising awareness, the show itself is trying to use less resources, and, hopefully, the viewers watching it are being inspired to do something about their ecological footprint.

If Tyra and the wanna be model can try to reduce their carbon footprints - then we all can!

Envrionmental Issues in Primary Schools

My daughter has been looking at envrionmental issues this term at her primary school. She is only in reception and they have been looking at recycling, endangered animals and other environmentatl issues. It all comes to a head today with their going green day. She has also been singing a little song over the past few weeks about recycling. See what you think!

Meeting 5/02/2008

Mrs Vickerman has spoke to Mrs Watson about the awareness week/day in April and she has approved this in principle. Mrs Watson recommended that we focus on organising a special day with Year 7, that can run each year with the next intake of Year 7 students. Chloe and Ashley both went to speak to Mrs Robinson to get the dates confirmed. We talked about

having a whole week of awareness activities finishing on the Friday with a dress down day, where students can wear something green. Activities such as creating green eco songs in Music, having paperless lessons, etc were put forward.

There is a possibility that some of the students will be able to go along to the next planning meeting for the propsed new building outside. This will be a good opportunity for us to ask questions and speak to the builders. Both Ashley, Tehreem and Chloe were insterested in this. Chloe will speak to Mrs Watson to find out when the next meeting is.

Mrs Watson has also said that she would be happy to sit down with the Eco Council and discuss a Green policy for the school. In preparation for this both Anjali and Aysha both did some research on other schools policies and have drafted something to be discussed at the next meeting.

Imogen from the Year 7 Eco Busters came along to speak to Najda to see what they could do to help out. Najda has asked that they carry out the survey from the Eco Schools website.

Ambar, Hemash and Oliver all had a meeting with Mrs Rasimowicz again to finalise the details for the letter that is going out next term. The council decided today that we would now send this to Year 7 parents initially and then roll it out from there. oliver has made a start on drafting the letter.

Mrs Vickerman had spoken to the people from the Carbon Trust today and it looks like we will be having our Carbon survey early next term.

Finally we were supposed to go to the Year 9 assembly today but this has now been postponed to next term.

Meeting 28/01/2008

We have achived the Bronze Award from Eco Schools. We are now focussed on the Silver Award.

The Year 7 assembly went really well, especially when they were told what they could win. Ashley and Aysha decided to create a poster showing all of the Post 16 Slaves on offer to encourage the Year 7 students to Blog.

Hemash and Ambar went to see mrs watson to ask if she would approve a seperate letter to go out to parents next term, rather than wait for the newsletter at the end of the term. Mrs watson pointed out that this would be using additional paper, so the council have decided that they still want to do it, and that they will use A5 paper instead.

Josh has been given the task of coming up with something special for the Year 11 assembly at the end of Feb. The Eco council are worried that the Year 11 students wouldn't respond well to just a presentation.

We discussed collecting old mobile phones to help raise some funds. This is something that we might do next term. There are some sites that offer to plant trees for old mobile phones.

Finally we discussed what our major project should be for the Silver and Green award from Eco Schools. We eventually agreed that organising an awareness week within school would be best. We are planning on the week commencing 14/04/2008. We are hoping that each department will have a green focus for the day or the whole week. We will need to speak to the Head of Departments again to get them to support this.

Year 7 & 8 Eco Competition

Year 7 & 8 we want your suggestions for how we could make Dixons Academy Greener. What could we do in school that would help us improve our Eco credentials?????????????

Please add your comments by clicking on the comments link directly below this post... Remember to add your Name and Form!!!!!!

All suggestions are welcome.

Remember the top 10 suggestion will win a Post 16 Slave for the day!!!

Meeting 22/1/2008

Najda gave feedback from the Head of Departments meeting that she went to with Harsimrat and Anjali. All of the HODs were supportive and have agreed to email Najda and Mrs vickerman with ideas on what they could do to improve their green credentials by Friday 18th Jan.

Today we started to plan who would go to each assembly and let the school know what we are doing; to promote the Blog and ask for ideas. We are starting by going to see Year 7 and 8 next week. Chloe, Matty, Hemash, Ambar and Nyomi volunteered to go to the assemblies. They broke off to plan what they were going to say.

We also went back to looking at how we could identify what green topics we covered in school in each department. Chloe, Oliver and Nafisa all went to speak to the Heads of Department to find out. We would like to put all of this information together so we can see what is being covered when and where. This will help us make some suggestions on what else could be covered.

Hemash and Ambar had a meeting with Mrs Rasimowicz to help establish how we can collate the reply slips from the newsletter. They spoke to her about what would need to go on the reply slips and and what information the form tutors would need to tick them all off.

Josh is going to speak to Mrs wright, Mr Freeburn about reducing the warning printing limit acroos school. The current limit is 499, so at the moment if you print a large document by mistake it will print automatically up to 499 pages. But if we reduce this to 100, all documents over 100 pages would need to be released from the helpdesk.