As with all of our projects we try and get the children involved as much as possible and with this in mind we have come up with a project called ‘Recycle, Retail and Reap the Reward’. Not only did we hope to educate the children involved but also raise a small amount of money in the process. 

The children decided that they wanted to set up their own business selling recycled goods. They wanted it to be modeled on a department store. Firstly they invited Santander into school who spoke to the whole class about writing a business plan. They allocated every member of the class a job ranging from Managing Director and Company Secretary to Quality Control Supervisor and Shop Assistant. The children decided to call their department store Green Tree.  They all designed a logo and voted on the final one. Using their ICT skills they each made a business card and headed paper was designed. The children wrote to local businesses and to parents explaining the idea and asking for quality second hand belongings. They sorted, priced and allocated the goods keeping records in Excel and once they had had their department store sale recorded who much money each department had made. 

Some of the class also gave some thought to designing various different ways of pumping the water from the rainwater harvesting system to our toilets. The most innovative resulting in a toilet with peddles attached, enabling you to pump the water to make it flush! 

By involving the children in this way we are able to cover many areas of the curriculum. This particular project has touched on Maths, English, IT, Design and Technology and Science. 

 This is quite an expensive project to undertake, however as a school we see that it has both environmental as well as educational benefits. We have already received donations from various sources; Southern Water – £1000, Santander – £150, NATS – £200 and our school PTA – £600, we are also waiting to hear back from the County Local Committee for Community Funding who we hope will give us a grant of £5000. The children’s department store raised over £200.

The idea of the project was to consolidate and add to what they had already learnt. The children made a papier-mache thermometer with a world at the base to use as a measure, the target being to be completely carbon neutral.

The children looked at the school and talked about what we already do to help the environment. They surveyed all the school children to see which of our projects they thought made the biggest difference to the environment. By doing this it really brought home to our children how much we do. The list included:

• Wind turbines
• Solar Panels
• Composting
• Chickens
• Recycling
• Planting our own wood
• Bugs Hotel Walking Bus
• Air Source Heating
• Wormery
• Water Butts
• Bird Boxes
• Bee Houses
• Ladybird Houses
• Regular rubbish collection

The children in class 5 looked at how we could save water at school. They measured the amount of water the children used when washing their hands, they put all the data into graphs to present to the whole school. As a result of this initiative we are now going to fit aerated taps to the bathroom basins.

The school decided that they wanted to spread the eco message to the wider community. The children wrote letters to parents and shop owners outlining how they could be more eco friendly and asking them to return a form to school saying how they would help. They also sent a questionnaire to all the other schools in the local area asking them what they do for the environment and inviting them to come and look around our school.

The school are also about to get a bio-mass boiler so the children were asked to design a ‘feeder’ for the boiler, some sort of device to move the wood chippings from their delivery spot into the boiler. Some of the other children designed playground equipment for the future e.g. a roundabout, a swing and a seesaw that create energy.

The final part of the project was to make a film in the style of a news report. The children were the presenters and the reporters, reporting from different areas of the school, they even had a weather forecast at the end!!

An opportunity was spotted to include the community in this project. Elderly members were invited into school and interviewed. They told the children about their experiences in the war, focusing on rationing and the produce they grew themselves.

The children researched war time recipes, searching out ones that could include produce that we grow in our own gardens. Holly class sent out invitations to all the older members of the community inviting them in for a home cooked war time lunch.

The children visited their local village, dressed as evacuees and purchased any other ingredients they needed. The village shops had been warned the children were coming and some had even dressed up themselves. What fantastic community spirit!

The children spent the morning cooking and at lunch time at least 30 local residents came for lunch. Not only did the children cook for them but they entertained them with the Jitter Bug and War time songs.

The children were able to experience living history, able to hear from the horses mouth how things used to be so different. In literacy they wrote invitations, shopping lists and recipes. They had to use maths to calculate ingredients quantities whilst cooking. In P.E. they learnt the Jitter Bug and in music they sang war time songs. Most importantly in PSHCE the children learnt about healthy eating, about caring for the community, they had to meet and greet their guests and make sure that their needs were met. The children were genuinely excited about this project. The feedback that we got from our diners was all very positive; they are clearly looking forward to our next event! Many of our children have started growing their own veg at home as a result of this project.

This project was such a success and we received such fantastic feedback that we intend to try and continue producing a community lunch at least once a year, at the same time as involving them in topics that we undertake.

We decided that we wanted to develop our school grounds even more and approached the local land owner, who agreed we could manage a strip of land for growing purposes. For several years now we have been developing this area which we now call our outside classroom. Every class is responsible for an area and we have developed a scheme of work linked to this.

Class 1 are our Womblers and keep the outside classroom tidy, they go shopping for seeds and grow sunflowers each year. Class 2 are responsible for the sensory garden and the bugs hotel. Class 3 are our composters and bug busters. Class 4 look after the hens, incubating, cleaning and feeding. Class 5 are the McGregors and do all the heavy work.

Every thing we grow, we use, or will use in the future. At the moment we grow and eat vegetables, soft fruit and chickens. In the future we will have hard fruits for picking as well as for making pies and pickles. We have planted hazel trees which will be used for pea sticks and bean poles, holly trees for Christmas decorations, Horse Chestnut trees for conkers and Willow trees for weaving as well, as Native trees for shade and to attract birds and insects. We have also planted Daffodils so we can take home flowers on Mothering Sunday.

We are learning to be custodians of the countryside and we realise that some of the things that we have planted we won’t necessarily benefit from but future generations of Turners Hill children will.

As this is an ongoing project we have been looking at ways to be more sustainable for the future years, we understand that farming has had to diversify and one of the areas farms are looking at is renewable energy, so we decided that we would do the same. In November 2007 we had two wind turbines installed and during the last summer holiday we had Solar Panels fitted.

During this past year we are embarked on an exciting project. In conjunction with the local land owner we to planted 1750 trees, in a three acre site adjacent to the school. These trees will be coppiced in rotation and will hopefully be used as fuel for a bio-mass boiler. We are also currently looking for funding to help us get a rain water harvesting system.

Last term we started a project call Ready Steady Grow, Cook. This linked really well with our healthy schools work. Class 5 visited a local supermarket and in groups of four were given a small budget of to buy food that would produce a healthy meal, some of their ingredients had already been grown in our gardens! They then came back to school and cooked their meal, there was pasta sauce, baked potatoes, fruit puddings and pancakes!

We want to develop this more by looking at how far our food travels and what local produce we can buy all year round. Most of the classes will be visiting farms this year and will look at how food is produced and will explore the journey from farm to fork. We hope to include a scheme of work that can be included in our outside classroom work. In the future we hope to do a joint project with our school in Spain on food and farming as well as linking with an inner city school to share our resources.

You can see where Turners Hill CofE Primary School is on a map and read about their local environment here.