Year 3 students
Over the past few months, the Year 3 students have been working with community groups including the B&B Highway, Planting Seeds and Whittlesea Council.
The B&B Highway program started in NSW and encourages schools and community groups to plant native flowering plants that will attract pollinators such as bees, insects and birds to the area. The pollinators can then travel around and stop off at these areas along the ‘Highway’ like humans can at a ‘Bed and Breakfast’.
Whittlesea Council kindly donated nearly 200 flowering plants and the students planted them in a special area behind the basketball courts. We then participated in some Webex sessions with the creators of B&B Highway and Planting Seeds to learn more about the importance of pollinators in our local areas. The students collected data about what pollinators fly around our school and used the iNaturalist App to register the plants and animals that we see at Mill Park Heights.
Tyler King, (a PhD student at Deakin University who is researching pollinators in urban areas), worked with us to create ‘Bee and Insect Hotels’ out of empty cans, bamboo and sticks that we can place around the gardens to encourage more pollinators to visit.
We have really enjoyed being part of this initiative and look forward to continuing with the program next year.
Mrs Becker and the Year 3 Students.
To celebrate National Recycling Week
To celebrate National Recycling Week in November, the City of Whittlesea hosted a competition asking students to create a robot made out of recyclable materials.
National Recycling week is a time to consider the Reduce, Reuse and Recycle principles and what we can do at home to minimise waste.
Lots of students form Mill Park Heights entered the competition and there were 3 winners from our school:
Alec M in 1D, Jordan Y in 1C and Bonnie H in 3A.
Narelle from Whittlesea Council presented the winners with some cool prizes and a special certificate on Friday.
Well done to everyone who created a recycled robot!
Mill Park Heights has a very dynamic student environmental action team made up of a representative from each grade across year 5 and 6. We are called The Environmental Tacklers.
Team members must campaign to be selected for the team and are elected by other students. Candidates usually prepare a speech about why they should be selected and present it to their grade after which an election is held. Environmental Tackler delegates represents their classes’ interests and present their ideas and suggestions to environmental team meetings for discussion and possible action.
The Delegates are independent students who have an awareness of social justice. They are confident speakers with an interest in the environment and prepared to get their hands dirty when the need arises for our gardening and school improvement initiatives. These students help plan and run whole school initiatives such as the wrapper free trophy, tree planting day, green day and Environment week. They have the opportunity to represent out school in the wider community at student leadership Environment Conferences and visit other schools to share the sustainability message and learn more about sustainability from others.
