Scoil Mhuire Cloneygowan

Meet our Greenschools committee for 2010-2011

Water Butt
We use the water butt to help save water in our school. The water butt behind the prefab collects rainwater during the school year. We use this rainwater to water plants and vegetables-Megan Kelly

Compost
Every day after big break, one person from 5th or 6th class goes around to all the classes with the kitchen caddy so everyone can put in fruit or veg skins. We then empty it into one of our three composters. Sometimes we add in pencil parings, shredded paper or cut grass and anything else that will decompose.
Nicole Kirwan

We had two clothing collection in school :

• St Luke’s Hospital
• Chernobyl Project

Thanks to all the parents. Reece



Green Schools Trail .
We had a Green Schools trail in the school playground where we put letters all over the playground. So we gave every group a sheet with hints on it for example Oil goes here……….. So each class got their turn and when they found all the letters they had to try and make a word. The word was Green Schools. It was great fun.
Gavin Murphy.

Our Action Day
On the 25th of May Mieke came to our school. She brought her bike. She told us to bring our bikes too. She taught us 4 steps for when we cycle on the road. Step 1. put your bike on the road and stand on the kerb. Step2. put you right pedal up. Step 3. swing your leg over the bike. Step 4. this step is called the life saver look. When you’re on your bike look over your right shoulder to see if there are any cars coming and off you go! After that she set up an obstacle course for us which was really fun! Rían

Mieke’s visit
When Mieke came she taught us about carbon. Carbon is a material and one of the many chemical elements found in and on our earth. A very small unit of an element is called atom. Carbon atoms are found everywhere. Carbon atoms can make bonds of chemical elements e.g. Hydrogen and oxygen. When carbon atoms make bonds energy is trapped.
Fossil fuels come from animals and plants that died millions of years ago when carbon bonds break by burning, they create energy, with this energy, we power, cars, factories and bodies. When the carbon bonds are broken energy is released, carbon atoms look for a new partner this comes in the form of two oxygen atoms. (carbon dioxide). The more fossil fuels we burn the more co2 we produce the more greenhouse gases we contribute to Global warming.
To reduce the use of fossil fuels use renewable energies. This year we tried walking, cycling and carpooling.
Megan and Sophie

WOW Days
To insure that they’re not so many cars at the school and to get more people walking to school we started wow [ Walk on Wednedays] Days . At first we used leaves [ paper ones] yellow for people who parked and “strided” ,brown for people who went in the car the whole way to school , green for people who walked/cycled to school. Then we would stick the leaves on to a paper tree that we had stuck to the wall . But when the tree got too full of leaves we started to give out the golden boot award to the class that had the least amount of brown leaves . We also used graphs to show our progress and to show how the amount of brown leaves had decreased from the beginning to now !
Emily

We got a letter in the post to say that we had earned our fourth Green Flag so we had to go to the Sheraton hotel to receive the flag.
When we got to the Sheraton hotel, we had to order what we would like for dinner. Then we had to go into a room full of chairs and take a seat. Then everyone was called up school by school to receive the flag, certificate and have our photograph taken with the Green flag.
There were representatives from counties such as Roscommon, Westmeath, Offaly, Long ford and Laois
When everyone had got their Green Flag we went into the next room to get our dinner. We had a lovely day thanks to An Taisce. Gavin
Ohh and those profiteroles were gorgeous!!!! ;) :)