News

Dear Roots & Shoots members,

Where has this year gone? I cannot believe how quickly time has passed – and yes it goes with the old age saying Time Flies When You’re Having Fun. And fun we have had, here at Roots & Shoots. From reminding ourselves of the importance of living in Peace with our planet’s inhabitants; to visiting Dolphins in Greece; running the Marathon; producing workshops in Finland and starting a fully focused university programme, not to mention the run up to the December awards – we and our R&S members have been busy.

I will let them tell you all about it. In the meantime, as Christmas is coming, amidst all the mad rush for presents and organising festivities, …

Read all of Newsletter – Autumn 2011

Over the year our environmental leaders have been working on a significant project around water with our partner schools; Backwell school in Bristol and Angoreb School in Ethiopia.  Over last year they looked at the water they used and shared their results with one another.  This included such things as how much water they used in bathing, showering, washing up and washing clothes.

The results were startling with a huge differences between the two schools in England and our Ethiopian partner which reflected the very different cultures and the precious nature of clean water in Africa.

This recently culminated in the first Green is Global International student and Head teachers conference …

Read all of Green truly Is Global

One of the many things at Penryn College that the environmental leaders find difficult is the number of plastic bottles and plastic things that get thrown away each day.  Even though a lot of this gets recycled the students thought they might do something a bit more interesting with the waste we produce so they decided to team up with the art department and create a piece of recyled art.

The first step was to ask the school to collect as much waste plastic as they could, from bottles to lids, bags to toys.  No-one expected the school to respond the way they did with over thirty bags of plastic waste collected in a single week.

With the art team the students …

Read all of Recy-Art

Something that our Green Team has been waiting for a long time for are our new editions to the school farm.  Three weeks ago two chickens, Victoria and Betty, and two rabbits, Rhubarb and Custard, came to stay.

The two light Sussex chickens have already started laying eggs, which are now being sold to the staff and the rabbits are creating a real buzz around the farm.  The idea of having the animals is to develop an empathy in students for all our living creatures and help students gain a sense of responsibility and commitment in their lives at school.

Each week two members of the Green team are chosen to look after the animals, visiting them everyday to feed and check on them during lunchtimes and the animals are more than …

Read all of Our new farm editions!

At the start of the summer our Green team took part in a nationwide project to grow wheat on our farm.  Called ‘Bake your Lawn’ it called for everyone to grow some wheat on their school plots and when the time was right turn it into flour.

In planting the wheat the green team tried three different methods, firstly scattering it randomly in the plot, or planting in rows and lastly putting it in clumps.  Over the summer the wheat grew, the planting in rows proving best, until in the autumn the wheat started to mature and turn brown.

One afternoon the team then cut down the wheat and tied it into bundles to go a golden brown before threshing and winnowing to gain the wheat …

Read all of Our own Penryn Cakes