Term 3 Eco Projects

Village Clean Raises £159 for Our

Eco-School Projects!

 

Pupils at Port Charlotte Primary School were out and about on Wednesday 5^th March as part of the “Clean Up Islay Day”.

The children collected all sorts of litter on their walk from school to Port Mor. Armed with litter pickers, rubber gloves, re-cycle bags and waste bags, the children set off to clean up the village, play park, camp site and beach. The children recorded the different types of litter they collected as part of their litter survey, to try and establish how successful their clean up day was. We found a lot of rubbish made from plastic, paper, glass and metal, as well as other types of rubbish such as old fishing nets and tyres.

When the children returned to school, they gathered their findings and totalled the number of items made from each kind of material.

The results were very interesting. We collected more rubbish than last year. We’re not sure whether this is a good thing (are we better at collecting?) or a bad thing (there was more rubbish to be found).

Plans for next term include a beach clean at Portnahaven before the visitors arrive to enjoy their holidays.

We’d like to thank ReJIG for all their help, and the cheque for £159 that they sent. The money will be used by the children in a number of ‘eco’ projects around the school.

Potato Projects Rolls off the Starting Blocks

 

Primary 4-7 pupils have been busy in the school grounds recently. They have been building ‘tyre’ beds for growing potatoes. The project is part of the ‘Grow Your Own’ project run by the British Potato Council and is linked to their studies of ‘Energy’.

The pupils co-operated in teams to use barrows and shovels safely to build the tyre beds.

The target for the end of this term is to have the tyre beds filled with gravel and top soil, and the seed potatoes planted!

Mr Brown, from Octomore Farm, has been very kind and delivered several buckets of top soil. We would like to say a huge thank you to him for all his help. We’d also like to thank Mr MacPherson for his very kind donation of used tractor tyres, without which we’d have nothing to plant our potatoes in.

We hope to make links with Bridgend Community Garden to learn from them how best to grow our potatoes. We may even manage a trip to BCG to help out there!

We hope to cook our potatoes at Healthy Tuck Shop, give them to Mrs Mackie and Mrs McLean to cook for lunch, and sell some to parents and friends as part of our enterprising project.