Lumsden Kindergarten

19th of June 2014

5th June was ‘World Environment Day’.

To celebrate ‘World Environment Day, 2014’ everyone at Lumsden has been actively learning all about the importance and meaning of this special day.

We focused on how we can support ‘World Environment Day’ and the ways we can make a difference particularly through our environmentally friendly and sustainable practices at Lumsden.

To begin with we learnt about what the word ‘environment’ means and have found if we look around us the environment is everywhere. Trees, flowers, birds tiny ants, oceans and lakes are all part of our environment. Look again, and we notice buildings, cars and machines. These also make up the environment. The environment is also about what we can not see, like the air.

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”

~John Muir

All the children at Lumsden are very keen to help feed our worm farm with the worms favorite food, which is scraps and then add the remaining food scraps along with any other gardening waste and leaves to the compost bin.

The worm farm produces worm tea (worm wees) and worm castings and the compost produces a compost which can be added to gardens as a rich fertilizer.
Little Lumsden looked at how to make their own paper from recycling paper.  This was an opportunity to engage in a process of what happens to used copies of work to reuse.  This was exciting as Gemma has just introduced this project at Big Lumsden recently.

Big Lumsden are also looking at recycling and how we can re-use paper.

Angela, from the Conservation Centre visited Lumsden and did a very comprehensive presentation which reinforced all the fantastic new knowledge the children have enjoyed learning about ‘World Environment Day’.

Angela discussed with the group  about taking care of our environment at Lumsden through environmental friendly practices of the compost bin, worm farm, and recycling bin. Angela was also very impressed with the operation of our compost bin, worm farm and recycling facilities. The children are also very interested in developing the ideas of a water tank to store rain water and food for our birdhouse created from pinecones covered with peanut butter and a selection of yummy seeds.

Lisa,our student from EIT, has introduced a new and fun song at mat time which is called “Jump if You Love the Earth!’ The children confidently shared the dance song with Angela when she visited Lumsden.

In the art room the children made bracelets made from recycled paper. We introduced a new recycling bin in the art room which is for our recycled paper and we used this paper to create our beads. The children had turns making the beads and were very proud of the result.

The children were able to contribute to the whole experience and loved being able to make bracelets using beads that they had made themselves.

This tied  in nicely with our environment study as we used recycled materials for our craft. The final product is wonderful, our bracelets look beautiful. What a great way to reuse our paper to create something new.

We endeavor to continue our earth friendly practices helping to look after the earth.