Delgany National School

Our theme for the next two years is biodiversity, a word which is frequently heard in the media. Our challenge will be to bring this theme to life within the school and in the wider community. Our new committee is up and running and already encouraging us to remember to recycle and reuse and to walk on Wednesday. ‘Walking on Wednesday’ of course includes other forms of non CO2 producing transport, so cycling is encouraged, especially as there are now cycle paths close to the school. However, as parents we can often feel that cycling with traffic levels as they are around the school is a little more challenging than we might like. For this reason, cycle training for our two senior classes was arranged with Noel Connolly. The children are now prepared for all eventualities on the road, such as right hand turns and roundabouts and are aware of traffic and safety on the roads. Bicycles and helmets were provided and all of the pupils have enjoyed this experience and learned from it also.

The Slim your Bin challenge involved pupils in class with their teachers to assessing our own waste in school and to trying to inculcate these values at home. We still in school continue to recycle batteries, stamps, paper, mobile phones, ink cartridges and to augment our prize winning compost heap.

After our energy awareness campaign, we also involved all of our parents in growing vegetables at home using home made compost. We have been planting potatoes and green salad vegetables. We have seen some wonderful vegtables in school and have heard how very well flavoured they all were, The planting was to encourage the understanding of the compost cycle, food scraps to garden gold, and prizes will be given for the best planting diaries kept, finest produce, best paintings and pictures etc.

We’ve been remembering to cycle or walk on Wednesdays and have been counting these for our walking tree. Every week our senior green schools reps will be asking us to count up how many walkers we have and the Golden Boot will be given out at the end of the month. Every month we’ve totalled these up and our most frequent winners have been second class so far, closely followed by Senior Infants. We’ve acquired a new cycle rack and with that and our new cycle paths both walking and cycling have become much safer and more fun.
Look out for lots of new competitions this year for Greenschools and wonderful prizes.

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News
Autumn 2011

Biodiversity Competition

Aisling and Eric Dalby were the First prize winners in our recent biodiversity competition with a model of their own garden and a beautiful record of all the living beings in their local area with fantastic photographs. They have won a camera.
There were ten second prize winners with varied projects from photographs to models and art work. Everyone who participated won a prize as the judge was extremely impressed with the quality of the entries.