As Environment Captains this year we have many tasks to complete. Our fantastic school is attempting to become a 5 star sustainable school. We have recently applied for a government grant to install $50,000 worth of solar panels. This would have a significant impact on our escalating power bills and remind us of the importance of using renewable energy.

In Terms One and Two we were doing a ‘have you turned off your lights?’ survey. We went around to all the classrooms at recess and lunch to see if they had turned off their lights and IWB. We are making big efforts to conserve power and are now more aware of our environment.

Our garden is thriving with winter vegetables, herbs and flowers and we are ready to harvest them. We are making the vegetables available to our parent community after assemblies on Friday for a gold coin donation. We also use this harvest to supply our canteen and feed our guinea pig population. We have had a roster so that every week the environment students from Grades 3 to 6 water the garden using water from our two water tanks. We recently planted a whole new array of trees around our school for National Tree Day. This is a good way for us to offset some CO2 we produce.

Our current Unit of Inquiry and Year 6 Exhibition on ‘Sustainability’ ties in perfectly with what we are doing around the school to be more sustainable. We have had guest speakers come in to tell us what is happening to our earth and what we need to do to make sure our natural resources are available for future generations. Some of the astonishing facts we’ve been told are:

• Did you know that rainforests are the lungs of the earth?
• Thousands of years ago the earth was covered by 34% rainforests and now sadly this figure is around 8%.
• Did you know that in the Northern Pacific Ocean there is a floating rubbish dump called the Pacific plastic soup? It stretches about 500 nautical miles from the coasts of California to near the coast of Japan. It is full of plastic waste that we have littered and has gone down the drains into the sea.

The topics we are investigating for our Year 6 Exhibition are: Endangered Species, Marine life, Consumerism, Ecological Design, Alternative Energy, Introduced/Protected Species and Deforestation.

Grade 6 Environmental Captains 2010