Eco Meeting Minutes | Portway Infant School

06.2.19

As a school we have decided to try and win an award from RHS. Today the Eco Rangers got their book ready to gather evidence needed to win the award. We have started filling in the book with evidence of what we have been doing and enjoyed working together to make our Eco Book look special. It is now on our Eco Schools display for you to look at in the school library.

27.11.18

The ECO rangers are concerned that staff and children have still been leaving lights on when they are not in the classroom. The rangers decided that the best course of action would be to have a monitor in each classroom to ensure this is happening. We discussed the teabag bucket and were pleased to see that most staff fruit and teabags were now being composted in our veg patch. Children reported that in some classes taps are being left on after use. The ECO rangers will report back to their classes about this being everyone's responsibility.

15.11.18

Our first meeting of the academic year. Today we talked about composting and decided that as a school we don't do enough. The ECO rangers have now put a bucket in the staff room for the staff and helpers to place their teabags and fruit skins. It was agreed that one ECO ranger would be in charge of emptying this bucket each day. The children also wanted to remind children and staff to turn their lights off at times when they are not in the room to save electricity and money.

19.06.18

At this week's meeting we prepared out boot for the St Edmund Church 'Bootiful' competition. The children all designed pictures to attach to the boot. We hope you will all go and cast your vote on Sunday 24th June. We also had time to design a sign for the school Hogary which has now been sent way to be varnished.

5.06.18 We had today's meeting in the log pile in the trim trail area of our school playground. We have lots of nesting boxes in our school trees and this year a family of bluetits nested in one of them. Yesterday the bluetits fledged their nest. This means they flew out of the nest box for the first time. We were all very excited to hear this news and will now make an effort to keep quiet in the quiet area so that we don't disturb our new residents.

22.05.18 St Edmund's Church contacted the Eco group today to ask if we would like to take part in their 'Bootiful flowers' competition. The Eco Rangers all agreed this sounded like a brilliant idea. We will be filling a shoe with some soil and planting a plant in it. We want everyone to know it is from Portway Infant School and one Eco Ranger suggested that we attach our school logo somewhere to the boot. We will be sending a letter out to ask parents to vote for our flower arrangement and hope lots of people will visit the church to see everyone's entries.

8.5.18 At today meeting we talked about hedgehogs as it was hedgehog awareness day on the 6th May. we worked together as an ECO group to build a hogary for any hedgehogs that might decide to visit us at school. We used an old cupboard and some large logs and twigs to disguise it. We all hope a hedgehog will come and stay soon.

24.04.18

This week we discussed concerns that the Eco Rangers might have. One Eco Ranger was still concerned about the amount of people parking directly outside school. She spoke to the rest of the group about the park and stride scheme that the Woodlands pub runs. Our Eco Rangers hope that people will listen to our concerns before someone is hurt outside our school as a result of dangerous parking. Another Eco Ranger talked to the group about saving water. We have two big water storage containers by the year two block. Our Eco Ranger reported that the tap on one of these was left on and the tank was almost emptied of all the water. We hope that people will remember to turn the taps off, both outdoors and inside our classrooms to conserve water now the weather is getting warmer.

03.04.18 The Eco Rangers were very excited that Ecclesbourne Nursery in Duffiled brought in a box full of herbs, heathers and flowers for our sensory garden. One of the parents in FS2 is going to come and help us plant them.

20.3.18 Today we wrote a letter to local garden centres to see if they would be be willing to donate some plants for our sensory garden. We all signed the letter and posted it off to them.

6.3.18 Today we talked about the sensory garden again. We have decided that we would like some bright flowers, some nice smelling herbs and some ornaments. We are going to write a letter to local garden centres to see if anyone will donate some flowers and plants to us.

6.2.18 Today we talked about hedgehogs. None of the Eco Rangers had experienced seeing a hedgehog in the wild and we want to encourage them to visit us at school. We decided that with the help of a Mum in FS2 that we are going to make a hedgehog hotel and celebrate Hedgehog awareness week in May!

23.01.18

Following on from our brilliant Reduce, Reuse, Recycle workshops we discussed how we can make more of an effort to recycle things at school. Our school cleaner is collecting bottle lids to raise money for children with cancer. We thought it would be a nice idea to compost our fruit at playtime. One of the Mummy's from FS2 is going to come in and sort our compost bins for us.

9.01.18

Today we talked about our sensory garden. We are really pleased with the new rock path but think we need to add some more plants to make it a nicer place to play. We went back to our classes to ask our friends if they had any ideas about what we could put in there.

5.12.17 Today we talked about the use of glitter in school. We read a report about how much plastic as accumulated in the seas and oceans in the last year alone and agreed that billions of tonnes was too much! As an Eco team we decided we couldn't ban glitter all together but instead have asked classes to try to use less and not wash it down the sink afterwards. Instead of glitter we decided that classes could make paper sequins and confetti and use paint and crayons to make pictures look good.

21.11.17 This week at Portway Infant School it is Road Safety week. The Eco Rangers went outside of school today for a walk to put letters on people's cars to remind them to park safely outside school. There were lots of cars to post letters on which made the Eco Rangers feel very sad. We all hope that people will listen to our concerns because we don't want any of our children getting hurt.

8.11.17 we were very excited in Eco Rangers today because Miss Broad told us that next week the Lord Mayor is coming to host an Eco Rangers meeting with us. As a group we decided on some questions that we would like the Mayor to answer. These are the questions that we decided on.

1. How did you get to school today? Did you walk or come in a car?

2. Can you help us think of a way to stop parents parking outside our school where it is dangerous to park?

3. Why do you support the charities that you support?

4. What ways have you raised money for these charities.

We are all looking forward to having the Mayor come and visit us at school and have decided we will all come dressed in green that day to raise money for the Mayors charities.

19.09.17 Today was the first Eco meeting of the academic year. We welcomed each other to the group and then headed out into the grounds of the school to see what needed doing. In the vegetable patch we noticed that lots of fruits and vegetables needed harvesting and decided that was our task for the meeting. We harvested lots of runner beans, broad beans, strawberries, onions and cabbages. As a group we discussed what we would do with our harvest and voted to take them all to the kitchen for the cooks to use in our school lunch the following day!

08.05.17 Today's meeting was a bit different to normal as we invited parents and grandparents to come and help us in the school garden. Everyone had a really lovely afternoon digging up weeds, turning over the soil in the raised beds and enjoying the sunshine! We all agree that the veg patch looks really tidy and more inviting for visitors. We decided to send out a text message asking if anyone had any spare plants for us to grow in our garden and have already had a great response!

25.04.17 Today we had our meeting in the new outdoor classroom. We think the new classroom is great and hope to have all of our meetings in there from now on! We went and looked at the vegetable patch and were upset to see that there were lots of weeds growing in all of the patches. We have decided that we should have a summer gardening afternoon and invite the parents to join us to de-weed the garden! Miss Broad is going to make a letter to invite the parents to come and along and we hope to see lots of people there.

27.03.17 At today's Eco Meeting we had an update on The Great British Spring Clean. We can report that across the country half a million bags of rubbish were collected. We were pleased that we took part to add to this number but were sad that half a million bags worth of rubbish were abandoned on the ground and not in bins. We then talked about Comic Relief. Our school raised £426.56 by dressing funny for money. Part of that money will go towards providing people in other countries with safe water. We are very lucky that we have safe water to drink and wash with , we learnt that 1 in 10 people still don't so we are really happy that we helped raise such a great amount to help with this.

27.2.17 At today's meeting we discussed the Big British Spring Clean. We have decided that we should sign up to the scheme and be part of this nationwide litter pick. We will be taking part on Friday 3rd March, each class will go out and pick up, and then bin any rubbish that we find in the school grounds. We talked about why litter picking is important. Here are the reasons we came up with:

1. small animals might get stuck in it.

2. animals might eat it.

3. people might slip on it.

4. it makes the school look messy.

06.02.17

At today's meeting we talked about the benefits of walking to school. We watched a video about this and then discussed the reasons why its so beneficial.

1. it's good exercise

2. it's chatter time (time to talk to our family)

3. it gives us an opportunity to spot things in nature such as birds and squirrels

4. it cuts down on pollution from exhaust fumes

5. it puts us in a great mood for the day and makes our brains work better

we decided to make some posters to put in our classrooms to encourage everyone to walk, park and stride, scoot or walk to school. These will be shared with all classes once they are laminated.

23.01.17 We are all so happy to anounce that we have six new Eco Rangers from FS2 and their names will be announced on here at our next meeting. Today we talked about why we have a Portway Panda at school. Miss Broad showed us a website all about the WWF and their work with pandas in the wild. There are now only 1860 pandas left in 6 isolated areas in China. The Eco Rangers were sad that this was such a low number. The WWF do an adopt a panda scheme, where each year our school pay money to the WWF to help fund projects to protect panda habitats and food sources. As Eco Rangers, we were all really pleased to hear that we are actively trying to help out the pandas. Miss Walker has agreed to put up a poster showing our adoption on the school helping hands wall.

10.01.17 Our first meeting of 2017 took place today! All of the Eco Rangers walked along the paths outside the school reception and we all agreed that the gardens were looking a bit messy. As a team, we picked up all the rubbish and put it in the bin and now the reception area looks much tidier. We also agreed this would have been much quicker for us to complete if there were more people doing it. As a result we decided that FS2 should start nominations for class Eco Rangers so that there will be more of us on the team. The results will be shared in assembly on Friday.

28.11.16: At today's Eco meeting we went to look at our vegetable patches. Toyota came to school in the summer holidays and revamped our patches and they looked brilliant. The Eco rangers were a bit sad today to see that some of them needed weeding and one looked very messy indeed. The Eco rangers decided it was a good idea to report this back to their classes. We talked about why it is so important to weed the patches. It helps plants we want in there grow better as weeds stop other plants growing; stealing their nutrients and sunlight. Weeds also look very messy as they take over the whole patch! The Eco rangers agreed that Miss Broad's and Miss Brown's vegetabe patches were the best looking ones with the least amount of weeds. Well done to those classes. We will be checking the patches again soon to make sure everyone is doing their bit to keep our vegetable garden looking neat and tidy.

14.11.16

Today's meeting was all about scarecrows. The Friends of Markeaton Park wrote to Portway Infant School to ask the year two children to design a scarecrow as a class. The Eco Rangers thought this was a really great idea and were excited to let their class know about the competition. Each year two class will be provided with a broom for them to design their scarecrow. The scarecrow MUST be from a nursery rhyme. The Eco Rangers discussed this and wanted their ideas to go in the minutes. They suggested Little MIss Muffet, Humpty Dumpty, Incey Wincey Spider, Jack or Jill, the cow from The Cow Who Jumped Over The Moon and the star from Twinkle Twinkle. The scarecrow needs room at the bottom of the broom to be 'planted'. Miss Broad will deliver the scarecrows to the Friends of Markeaton Park where members of the public will vote on which one they think is best from a variety of schools across the city. A prize will be awarded to the winning school. The Eco Rangers would like to wish the year 2 children (and their teachers) the best of luck for this competition.

31.10.16

We had our second meeting today for this year. We talked about the last meeting we had and the issues it raised. Last time, we agreed something needed to be done to encourage people to turn off the taps when they have finished using them. Five people entered the competition that the Eco Rangers ran to design a poster to be placed in all sink areas across school. Using the Eco Ranger suggestions box, each Eco Ranger casted a vote for their favourite poster. We are pleased to announce that Thomas Dibble designed the winning entry. The Eco Rangers would like to congratulate Thomas on his brilliant poster which will now be reproduced to display in all sink areas.

10.10.16 Firstly a BIG welcome and congratulations to our new Eco Rangers. Well done for being nominated to do this very important job by all of the children in your classes. We had our first meeting of the year today and our main focus for the meeting was water. At Portway Infant school we are very aware of how to save water. In our vegetable patch we have two big water tubs which are filled from the drain pipes on the year 2 block building. We know that if we are in the garden we can recycle the water from these tubs to water our plants. Some of us were very worried that people are forgetting to turn taps off in our classrooms. The Eco Rangers have decided that we should run a competition across the school for children to design a 'turn off the taps' poster. The winner will have their poster created and laminated to go up in all classrooms, the staff room and staff toilets! A very successful first meeting Eco Rangers. Well done!!