This year sees the launch of the new ESD Committee. Our motto, along with that of the Global Environmental Movement, is Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The aim will be to ensure that the school does all it can to use the World’s limited resources in a responsible and sustainable manner. The new Head of Science, Alistair Taylor, is the teacher in charge of the ESD programme (Education for Sustainable Development).

Interest is such that 80 College students have signed up to become part of the ‘committee’! It was therefore not possible to have just one group, but we have established a range of sub-committees to work on various initiatives.

These include:

  • Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of recycling at the school.
  • Strategies to reduce wastage of electricity and water.
  • Strategies to reduce food waste.
  • Improvements to the Nature Reserve.
  • Composting.
  • Communication of environmental matters with the school community.
  • New initiatives.

There is much to be done in all of these areas, but the students have already organised assemblies to increase awareness, and on Friday 10th April, we launched the College reusable water bottle scheme.

The aim is to reduce the use of plastic bottles by encouraging every member of the school community to buy and use their own reusable College water bottle!

As the year progresses many initiatives, both educational and practical, will be undertaken and the hope is to make St George’s a real leader in the field of environmental sustainability.

Nature Reserve

The Green Committee is working very hard in an area of our premises that wasn’t being used until now. First they were carrying out general cleaning duties at first and then building the perimeter to protect the forthcoming tasks that would take place. There were experts who were in charge of classifying, for example, native plants from which we expect a successful proliferation. We’ve set up a pond with marshy and aquatic plants inside this space that will help increase vegetal biodiversity, in addition to producing the right ecosystem for little animals like frogs, toads, tadpoles, among others. All of this, in addition to the building of elements that allow our students to have classes there, fosters an excellent learning environment in harmony with the nature.

The recovered new space is called the Nature Reserve and was created to:

Favour a greater presence of nature as the value that manifest love for the life; encourage the use of green spaces and stimulate contact with nature to counter the current tendency of modern life.

This new area was promoted among students and parents using audio-visual materials (presentations in Kinder, Prep and Infant Assemblies), which includes the preparation of a map showing the place where the reserve is located and the aim of its creation.

The planning Sharing the Planet was prepared based on the PYP “Programme of Inquiry” with the aim that conceptual, procedure and attitude contents can be directly related to the planning and the workshops with the group of Naturalist Kids. The planning included a series of workshops given to student from EP1 to EP6.

For Kindergarten planning was based on the content sequencing of our Natural Sciences curriculum to contemplate a direct relationship with the workshops of Naturalist Kids and in K1, K2 and K3 during the 2013 academic year.