With a funding grant from Boyne Smelters Ltd’s ‘Building School Legacies’ program, St. Francis Primary School has been working together with the Creative Recycling Centre to renovate the Greenhouse in the school.
Last Friday was the official launch of the Greenhouse Project, which the CRC and St. Francis students have been working on throughout Term 3. The project has involved using recycled and repurposed materials – all materials that would otherwise end up in landfill. The school has used many materials to unexpected materials to revamp the space including coffee pods, fishing line, tyres and fly screen to golf clubs, garden lattice and milk bottles.
Project lead Jacqui Foster from CRC has seen the project as a fantastic opportunity to instill values of reusing and recycling materials to the kids.
She said “It’s important that we teach our children that items can have many uses – so many things can be repurposed and all it takes is a little imagination to stop them ending up on the rubbish pile.”
St Francis students have had imagination by the truckload during this project – evidenced in the array of ways they have reused materials and the creative ideas they have implemented. The students have created someinteresting pieces, threading bottle tops onto fishing line to make ‘curtains’, and painting a Great Barrier Reef Mural onto old tyres.
School Principal Kathleen Watt said of the project, “The students have been enthusiastically creating messages of sustainability and environmental stewardship under the guidance of the Creative Recycling Team. The project was such a powerful context to make connections not only to the Australian Curriculum, but to life-long learning.”
The Greenhouse Project was officially unveiled to the community last Friday in a ceremony at St. Francis Primary School.