aquaBUBBLER Drinking Fountains » school

All things green in Emerald

aqua — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 03:12:03 +0000

Environmental & sustainability education at Emerald Primary School is a great example of a school living what it teaches.

Nestled in a beautiful, picturesque part of Victoria it’s easy to understand why the school community is inspired to look after the environment.

Emerald Primary School container deposit scheme

Leigh Johnson, the environmental and sustainability coordinator, says the students love being part of the process: “It’s in and about their world. It’s about learning by actually putting ideas into practice”.

Some of the many impressive projects include:

— A school windmill – creating sustainable energy for the school & pumping water into the schools taps

— water tanks – storing rainwater for use in the school’s toilets

— a container deposit scheme

— school weather station – measuring temperature, air moisture, wind chill, air pressure and a rain gauge

Mr Johnson adds, “The idea is to ‘normalise’ the experiences the kids learn about in environmental studies. So that they expect to see veggie patches everywhere, wind turbines and solar heating.”

There is a “Loo Crew”, a group of students who want to help raise awareness of the sanitation crisis facing many countries (with the assistance of WaterAid – see http://www.wateraid.org/) . And the “Don’t Palm Us Off” crew – a group of students who want to educate the school community about the harmful effects of the palm oil trade and the threat to orang-utan habitats.

Emerald Primary School Students open their Yarra Valley Water Choose Tap aquaBUBBLER with water bottle refill station

“These student-led initiatives are examples of where social action meets sustainability”. These activities are part of students embracing their responsibility and contributing to the wider world and sustainable communities.

Emerald Primary School recently received its own aquaBUBBLER as part of Yarra Valley Water’s “Choose Tap” initiative.

aquaBUBBLER is proud to be a prize partner of Cool Australia’s ENVIROWEEK.

aqua — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 00:15:55 +0000

ENVIROWEEK is all about young Australians taking positive action to raise awareness for a sustainable future.

From August 25-31 schools, classes, and individual students are taking up the green challenge. There’s a “Green Thumb” challenge to plant a veggie patch, a “Shopper Challenge” to resist buying anything new for a week ,and a “Sparky” challenge to save energy.

Our favourite is the Go Tap challenge – swapping all bottled and canned drinks for refreshing and healthy tap water!

There are competitions and prizes – an Eco-Fundraiser competition and a Creator competition. And best of all you could win an aquaBUBBLER with water bottle refill station. For more details see http://www.enviroweek.org/.

Well well well! Here’s an inspired way to celebrate sustainability week!

aqua — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 04:31:06 +0000

At the end of each year Epping Views Primary school hosts a Sustainability Celebration afternoon to celebrate their impressive range of sustainability activities (they recently won Resource Smart School of the Year.)

They usually gather together to compete in a fun-filled competition to test their knowledge about sustainability. But this year they decided to celebrate by sharing how fortunate they are to have clean water and sanitation by raising money for an extremely worthy cause. They undertook a week of activities and events to raise $1425 to help an African community get improved access to clean water.

The program, run by World Vision, uses the money to combine water infrastructure (i.e., sinking new wells, repairing damaged hand pumps and building toilets) with hygiene education to help stop the spread of deadly waterborne diseases and ensure better health for children in impoverished communities.

Epping Views Primary school also made student education part of their fundraising process. They kicked off the week with an assembly of around 600 people watching a World Vision video clip called A Day in the Life of Lucy. Students, staff and parents were all very moved, and this led to fantastic involvement in scheduled classroom and lunchtime activities, a ‘sustainability dress up’ day, selling badges and drink bottles, and an all-in, hands on activity making the word WATER from coin donations, which alone raised $334.

“We’ve been learning how important it is to drink water to stay healthy”, commented one student, “so we are very happy to help other kids who need water too but can’t just go to a tap like we can”.

Jan Hare, the school’s Wellbeing and Sustainability Teacher, added: “Sustainability is about helping to build better communities everywhere. That includes building an active community spirit here at the school regarding global issues like access to clean water, to building stronger, healthier villages in places like Africa”.

Read up on water World Vision’s work towards water sanitation and hygiene here. Or get their series of 6 lesson plans on water and other teaching material here.