Earth Day 2022

During the first week back this term, each class had a chosen are of learning from the Eco School themes. We have just started our first Eco Club, run by Mrs Baldwin, and we are excited to see the impact that this Eco committee will have on our school. Here are the themes that each class worked on for our recent exhibition to celebrate Earth Day:

Nursery: Water , Reception: Healthy Living, Year 1: School Grounds, Year 2: Litter, Year 3: Waste, Year 4: Global Citizenship, Year 5: Biodiversity, Year 6: Energy.

Ducklings

Ducklings Class looked at water and how we use it. We completed a knowledge harvest and focused on how we can reduce how much water we use both in school and at home. We made posters to remind people to turn off the tap and stop wasting water. We talked about how using a reusable water bottle reduces plastic waste in our environment. We also discovered that we have a river called the River Medway which runs through Maidstone, we looked at the impact of plastic and rubbish entering the river and how this affects animal life by creating our own River Medway.

Reception

For Earth Week, Robins explored different ways that people can live a healthy lifestyle.

We started by looking at the different ways in which we travel to school, and found that the most popular choice, was walking. We said it was good to exercise on our journeys to and from school and you can get your heart beating faster by walking, scooting, cycling and running. Here are some badges we designed and thought that if children were healthy movers, by exercising on their journey to and from school, then they could win a badge to wear on their uniform.

Children said that it was really important to eat fruit and vegetables every day and we then looked at some fabulous art work from Giuseppe Arcimboldo. We were so inspired with what we saw, that we created our own! Have a look at the different shaped fruits and vegetables we've chosen to represent the different features on our faces.

We finished by doing the learning showcase in the hall and loved seeing what all the different classes focused on. It was absolutely wonderful to see so many parents come and see the hard work we put in - thank you!

Year 1

Sparrows spent time during Earth Week looking at the school grounds. We had lots of opportunities to spend time outside and consider ways to make our outside area more inviting and good for learning. These are some of our ideas: plant more flowers for the wildlife and for us as they make us feel happy, paint a large hopscotch on the slope leading into school building, add benches for children and adults to sit down and have a compost bin for our fruit and veg waste. We also spent time looking at the trees that share our school grounds and sketched them, did bark rubbings and painted them. We thought about how the trees make us feel and we decided that trees are very special as they help to feel calm and relaxed. We can also recommend giving a tree a hug!

Year 2

Blackbird Class had an amazing week completing their project all around litter. We started the week by doing a litter pick around the school. It became extremely clear to the children that most of litter accumulated around Oaks Primary Academy had been thrown over the fence by members of the public. Seeing this really made the children understand how important it is, that even if there isn't a bin nearby, to keep hold of their litter and dispose of it correctly. Blackbirds collectively decided they wanted to make a difference by using recycled litter from lunch times in school. We researched a charity called the Crisp Packet Project. This charity uses recycled crisp packets to make blankets for homeless people. Not only did the children do a wonderful job collecting crisp packets from home and from lunch times in school, they also made a class survival blanket that will be donated to the charity to help somebody in need. Earth week has really highlighted to Blackbirds the importance of not only discarding litter properly but has also made them realise how much litter can help save someone else's life. As they say, "one man's trash is another man's treasure."

Year 3

Woodpecker Class looked at waste as our theme for Earth Day. We chose to focus on paper waste and single-use plastic waste. As part of our learning, we collected all the paper waste from across the school and calculated the amount of trees Oaks Primary Academy wastes across a year - over 5 trees! We discussed that although this many not seem like a lot, it takes decades for a tree to grow so even putting 5 trees in the bin over a year is not helping our planet. We made bar charts and wrote a letter to Mr Moore asking for recycling bins in order to help us stop wasting so much paper. We also conducted research about single-use plastic bottles and want to convince Mr Moore to ban the use of single-plastic bottles so every child in school brings in a reusable bottle with their water in.

Year 4

Blue Jays were researching all about global citizenship and how we are connected across the world. We came up with an idea to collect our own data on what nationalities are in our school. To do this, we created a tally chart and asked all pupils where they were from. We discovered that there are 23 nationalities in our school, which took us by surprise! In Blue Jays alone, there are 6 different nationalities. We then decided to convert our data into a bar chart and pie chart to show other classes. This was a really interesting activity. From this, we then decided to research the flags of the nationalities around the school and create a piece of artwork. This has made us even more open-minded and understand different cultures across the world, which links to our inquiry of 'Laws, traditions, values and customs help define national identities'. We can't wait to learn about new cultures!

Year 5

Kingfisher class were responsible for looking at biodiversity as our theme for Earth Day. There were so many different areas that we could have looked into so we narrowed it down to comparing the number of plants in the local park to the number of plants in the school field and looking into how to help increase the number of hedgehogs in our area. Through our fieldwork, we found out that there were more flowers in the park than in the school field. However, we found that the flowers in the park were mostly all grouped together rather than scattered, like they were on the school field. We determined that this was because of the amount of usage that our field gets. As well as looking into plants, we looked at the dwindling biodiversity of hedgehogs. In order to help raise the numbers, we created our own hedgehog houses which we will place outside in the woodland area to help hedgehogs have a safe area to stay, away from any predators.