Fair-trade healthy food packaging - Design Project

Art & Design have teamed up with Home Economics to design a healthy food product. S2s have created the product in HE and have designed the packaging in A&D. We have focused on the importance of Fair-trade.

Eco Art Wall Progress

1W1 started painting their designs onto the panels today. Our S6 helper, Ayisha, is making a panel of her own - see below!

Earth Hour

The lights go out in the foyer...

This Saturday 26 March 128 countries around the world will be celebrating Earth Hour - turning all lights off for one hour from 8.30pm, local time, to show we care about tackling climate change.
At Currie we joined more than 450 other schools in Scotland in marking the event this Friday 25th. The Energy Group asked all staff and pupils to turn their lights off Periods 1 & 2 (where safe) to mark Earth Hour 2011.Lots of other electrical equipment was switched off during this time.
The Energy Group also requested that all group tutors show a 3 minute video of Earth Hour during the extended registration.

Staff composting

We've just added a compost bin to our staff room for tea bags, banana skins etc - all fruit and vegetable waste.
The fruit and veg waste composted at school will be put back into the veggie and flower beds once its turned into nice compost.

More work on the Eco Art Wall...

Today, work began on the “second phase” of the Eco Art Wall! 1H2 and Mrs Steel started the project by researching Scottish wildlife before venturing out into the Green Garden to do some observational drawing and to view our site!

English in the sunshine

Ms Jordan's S2 English class enjoyed some sunshine out in Roley's Wood this morning. We looked at trees from different perspectives, found our own unique special place in the woodland and did a sound map of the area, all to help inspire some descriptive writing back in the classroom.

Eco Committee Poster Work!

The Eco Committee recruited a few new enthusiastic S1 members this week! We also continued our work on our three Currieco posters - these will be entitled 'Our World', 'Our School' and 'Our Footprint'.

Eco Art Wall in the Making!

After researching Scottish Wildlife for the Green Garden's "Eco Art Wall", 1W1 and Mrs Steel began work on our wooden panels today. We got our old painting shirts on and began sanding down the edges and preparing the surface for our excellent designs... Watch this space!

Tadpoles!

The school tadpoles hatched on Tuesday, to much excitement. They hung around for the first day or two practising moving their tails and are now starting to swim around a bit. You can see their external gills in this picture.

Members of the John Muir Award group are recording their development each day with notes and drawings in our Frogspawn Jotter.

Pruning trees in ESD

Two S1 classes studying Education for Sustainable Development helped prune trees in the school grounds this afternoon. The trees were planted as wildlife corridors as part of the Millenium Forest Project and are now 10-11 years old and needing some management.  The pupils got stuck in using loppers and bowsaws to prune the lower branches of the trees. This creates more space and allows more light to reach the ground which encourages a diverse ground flora - good for biodiversity!  We cut all the branches into small sections and created habitat piles as homes for wildlife like hedgehogs, frogs and beetles.  Thanks to Esperanza from the Edinburgh and Lothians Greenspace Trust for organising it to happen.

Pond dipping in the quadrangle

The John Muir Award Group were out dipping in the quadrangle pond this afternoon looking at the diversity of pondlife we have there.

We also spotted some frog spawn in the Japanese Garden and decided to take it into one of the Biology classrooms to be able to study its development. We set it up in a tank with pond water and oxygenating pond weed and have started a Frog Spawn jotter where we'll record its progress every week.

Celebrating Fair Trade fortnight

S6 pupils ran two stalls this morning raising awareness of Fair Trade. Fair Trade tea, coffee and chocolate brownies were served in the staffroom and Fair Trade chocolate and cereal bars were sold to pupils during morning break.   Over £60 was taken, and all proceeds will go to support the setting up of a Fair Trade group in the School. We're hoping over time to become a Fair Trade School, running a regular tuck shop for pupils and serving Fair Trade tea and coffee as standard in the staff room and at meetings.

Cardboard Recycling

As part of our aim to reduce the school’s waste going to landfill by 25% during this session, the Sustainable School Group has turned its attention to cardboard. At the moment most of the cardboard boxes in the school are thrown away in the big paladin bins, unbroken up, taking up large amounts of space and costing the school money.

The school is working with Direct Cleaning to start recycling the school's cardboard.

Keep Scotland Tidy Photography Competition

A Scotland-wide young people’s photography competition has been launched with the theme as ‘Have some pride – keep Scotland tidy!’ Prizes include Jessops vouchers and your very own professional photo shoot. Pupils in the school have been encouraged to participate by picking up an application form before the deadline of 25 March.

Woodland Management

Today we found that the time had come to consider the management of our perimeter woodland planting. Twenty years ago Roley Walton had a dream to plant a corridor of trees and shrubs, linking our Curriehill Woodland Strip (now Roley’s Wood) with lines of trees west of the school. This would make a wildlife corridor providing wider breeding, feeding and spacial possibilities for our woodland flora and fauna. Ten years ago, Millennium Forest Scotland and Fiona McLean in Biology made the dream a reality! Ten years on the trees have grown to the stage of needing thinning and general management. Some of the older trees (isolated individuals aged 30 or 40 years) growing behind the younger trees are now causing neighbours some difficulties! Rachel Avery planned a meeting for today to address this issue with Ross Woodside (Lothian and Fife Green Network Partnership). The partnership has provided Rachel with a management plan and the promise of a small amount of practical help.

Drawing in the Green Garden!

Some of our S1s have started observational drawings of Scottish wildlife in preparation for our Green Garden Mural Design project. Mrs Steel and 1W1 popped out to the Green Garden this morning for some inspiration!