At Templestowe Park PS, we are committed to educating our students about the importance of being environmentally sustainable and embedding practices that will reduce our school’s impact on the environment. We believe that children benefit highly from interacting directly with their environment and should be provided with opportunities to engage in outdoor learning to develop a sense of responsibility for their natural world.
To ensure that we provide our students with the highest standard of sustainability education, Templestowe Park Primary School has proudly constructed an Outdoor Eco Education Centre. The outdoor learning space consists of a number of raised garden beds for teaching and learning about food production and healthy food choices an outdoor classroom formed around a community garden space, a chicken coop connected to a free ranging orchard area and numerous worm farms and compost tumblers to reduce the amount of food waste that we are sending to landfill.
In addition to embedding sustainability into our classroom curriculum and lunchtime activities, Templestowe Park students are also given the opportunity to partake in weekly workshops run by a sustainability educator from Eco Ed Australia. The workshops are designed to provide students with a deeper understanding of how to adopt sustainable habits into their daily lives and to support the students in becoming environmentally responsible leaders of the school.
The workshops have strong links to the Victorian Curriculum and cover a range of topics including:
- gardening skills;
- seed propagation;
- composting and worm farming;
- practical application of “Reduce Reuse and Recycle” initiative;
- water saving initiatives; and
- exploring energy sources and reducing our energy use.
Biodiversity Writing Competition Winners!
Congratulations to our talented writers from Grade 3P who successfully entered a Biodiversity competition with ‘B&B Highway’, winning a $500 voucher, kindly donated by Bunnings Group in conjunction with PlantingSeeds. This is a program that visits schools to help promote and plant a rich environment for endangered species by making ‘Bed and Breakfasts’ for insects and animals: bees, birds and butterflies. Our students wrote about why we are Biodiversity Champions and which animal they would love to support at their school. From the students’ inspiring and innovative writing, we won a $500 voucher and an incursion for all our Grade 3 classes.
Resource Smart School
With the assistance of CERES Environmental Park in Brunswick, we are also working towards becoming a “ResourceSmart School”. ResourceSmart Schools is a Victorian Governmen
t initiative that helps schools to become more sustainable. We are currently working on the ‘core module’, which is the first of five modules, and focuses on identifying how we can develop sustainable practices throughout our school.
Garden Awards. Congratulations to the entire school community on this outstanding achievement!
