EnviroKids at Pymble Ladies' College

We represent the EnviroKids Club at Pymble Ladies' College.

EnviroKids is an eco-friendly club for girls in Junior School at Pymble Ladies' College which meets each week to look at environmental issues.

EnviroKids at Pymble Ladies’ College

By Hanan Hassan and Julia Lin, Year 5

We think it’s so cool to win the Young Panda Award for Earth Hour 2011! We are ten years old and are the nominees representing our EnviroKids Club at Pymble Ladies’ College.

EnviroKids is an eco-friendly club for girls in Years 3 to 6 at the College. The club was first formed in 2009 and meets each week to look at environmental issues around the world and within Australia. We are two of the original founding members of the club, which together with support from our science teacher, Mrs Dena Mouton, have been working on activities to help make our school more environmentally friendly.

We see our work in the club as helping our friends and teachers at school by taking them on a ‘green journey’. EnviroKids has also created a Gardening Club where girls plant and tend to vegetables and herbs in their veggie patch. The club has harvested tomatoes, sugar snap peas, mint, herbs and other vegetables, as well as daffodil bulbs and flowers.

EnviroKids members do lots of fun things. For our big projects, we do a lot of research, planning and discussion before we get to do the activities. The biggest projects we have undertaken include:

• School litter sweeps
• Planting shrubs as part of bush regeneration
• Lunch box Fridays – these are waste free lunches, which also encourage healthy eating
• Clean up our Schools Day – as part of the Clean Up Australia Day
• Earth Hour Week activities – which are listed below
• Green Mufti Days – to raise money for a compost bin for the Garden Club’s vegetable patch

EnviroKids acknowledged Earth Hour 2011 during the week commencing 21 March to 25 March. The theme for our week of activities was ‘Time to go beyond the hour’ and some of the activities included:

• Switching off all lights, fans and air conditioning in rooms when not in use
• Switching off all power points when not in use
• On 25 March, we switched off all lights, computers, laptops, fans etc. for two lessons. Our teachers held classes outside between recess and lunch and our lessons were on environmental issues

One of the best things EnviroKids has done was to organise a tree planting ceremony for World Environment Day last year. It was really nice to have the whole Junior School supporting us; it’s so important for everyone to support these activities because we all have to look after our environment and also our world.

In EnviroKids we promote the three Rs: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. As we are a laptop school we encourage girls to print only in black and white, back-to-back and to make sure that they check their work before printing. We have organised scrap paper boxes and recycling bins in all our classrooms.

Our future projects for EnviroKids include getting all eco-friendly appliances at school (the ones that show the star sticker rating energy use), as well as getting solar panels and a water tank.

We are very excited to be a part of EnviroKids as it is a fun way to do practical things that can help and teach all the girls about reducing our carbon footprint and making our school environment a greener place. We also get to learn about ways we can help the environment at home and enjoy getting our parents and family members to participate in water-saving and power-saving activities.

• School litter sweeps
• Planting shrubs as part of bush regeneration
• Lunch box Fridays – these are waste free lunches, which also encourage healthy eating
• Only print when you have checked your work
• Switching off all lights, fans and air conditioning in rooms when not in use
• Switching off all power points when not in use.