Earth Hour this Saturday

WWF’s Earth Hour is this Saturday at 8.30pm. It’s a chance to show your care for our beautiful planet by joining millions of people all across the world in turning lights off for one hour. We’ll be having our own school Earth Hour Period 2 on Friday to show our support.

Eco Committee pupils from Currie at last year's launch of Earth Hour at Edinburgh Castle

Green Flag Award success!!

We had an assessment visit this morning from Dugald MacGilp of Eco-Schools Scotland.  The Eco Committee did a superb job of explaining how the Eco-Schools programme runs at Currie and taking him on a tour of the school and grounds to show off what we've been doing.

Pupils from S1 - S6 spoke about their work, from the Fair Trade group to those planning the visit to Chogoria High School or the activities of the school grounds volunteers, from our S1 Sustainable Development Education course to the S2 GO4SET group, from an anti-litter campaign to a sustainable house design unit and learning about Fair Trade in French.

Huge thanks to everyone who was involved in this morning's visit. Dugald said he was 'bowled over' by the level of knowledge and enthusiasm of the pupils he met, and that he was delighted to renew our Green Flag for another two years. Hurray for us!

Eat a Rainbow!

In their Art & Design lessons, 2L1, 2L2 and 2K1 created a lovely new healthy eating message for the Dolphin Café. The message asks you to “Eat a Rainbow Every Day”. 

Basically, the more different colours of fruit and veg in your diet, the more variety of vitamins and nutrients you will benefit from. For example, orange fruit and veg contain beta-carotene, flavonoids, potassium and vitamin C. These nutrients can help reduce cholesterol and blood pressure and can help to build healthy bones. Make sure you eat your five-a-day today!  And thanks S2s for making such a beautiful display for us all to enjoy.

New banner for the Fair Trade group

The Fair Trade group decided that we needed to make our stall for the weekly tuckshop, parent evenings and other events look a bit more striking. So we tie dyed some old curtain material, cut up some even older pieces of material and here is the banner we made!

Doing the Splits for Fair Trade Fortnight

The focus for Fairtrade Fortnight this year is the unfair price of bananas. The cost of staples like bread, eggs, sugar and milk has gone up by about 79% in the last 10 years but the average cost of loose bananas has gone down by more than 40% while the cost of production has soared. It is the banana growers and workers that have lost the most and many are being forced into poverty.

We wanted to encourage people to buy Far Trade bananas so pupils were asked to bring a banana to school or buy a banana from us and we made it into a Fair Trade banana split. This was a very delicious though rather sticky activity!

We also sold home baking using Fair Trade ingredients and altogether raised £49.50 for Burma Assist, the charity we are fund raising for this term. Many thanks to Scotmid who supported our event.

Litter bin meeting

Three members of the Eco Committee met Robert Davidson this week, our local Environment Task Force Manager at the council. We'd got in touch through Councillor Bill Henderson to ask if we could have a new bin at a specific place between the school and the shops where litter can be a problem at lunchtimes, particularly when the weather is nice.  

Robert was very helpful and has agreed to trial three new bins in places that we suggested!