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Protecting Our Environment

‘Protecting Our Environment’ is the focus for dot-art Schools 10th birthday

For the first time in the competitions’ history we set an optional theme for schools to respond to as a way of marking the 10th birthday of the competition. Working in partnership with Edge Hill University this theme offers a creative way to encourage discussion and raise awareness of the climate crisis with children and young people.

Prizes on offer to winning students and their schools also reflect this with workshops from Farm Urban and GROW Wellbeing up for grabs, alongside other great art based prizes. 

The winning students who responded to this important theme are:

‘Protecting Our Environment’ theme primary winner “Save our polar bears” by Roman Waring of Bridgemere CE Primary School.

‘Protecting Our Environment’ theme secondary winner “Extinction” by Eve O’Mahony of Bellerive FCJ Catholic College.

‘Protecting Our Environment’ theme runners up were:

The primary runner up is “Save the planet 20” by Nathan of St Matthew’s CE Primary School.  

The secondary runner up is “Insects & the environment 13” by Nina Renwick Horne of King David High School. 

Eco theme judge Duane Chong also awarded highly commended to “The helpful cat” by Isaac Creighton Year 5 student of Childwall Valley Primary School and “Save our whales” by Ollie E of Delamere Academy. 

           

Congratulations to all those students!   

Farm Urban offers two pioneering school learning programmes; The Future Food Challenge for secondary schools and Future Food Heroes for primary schools.

The Future Food Challenge is a 12-week STEMxEnterprise project in which students build a prototype aquaponic system and pitch a start-up social enterprise to industry leaders. This student-led, after-school course gives year 9 students a chance to develop skills in science, engineering and enterprise, offering hands-on experiences of innovative approaches to growing food and socially engaged/responsible businesses.

With the 6-week Future Food Heroes programme, primary school pupils get the chance to learn about circular food growing systems. Through building an aquaponic Produce Pod, they’ll see how fish and plants can grow together to make tasty greens! They’ll also see how waste food products can be used to grow mushrooms, and how worms and leftovers create compost and natural fish food. Both programmes are underpinned by their own unique, custom designed online learning platform with full resources, session plans and video content.

 

GROW-Wellbeing supports schools and nurseries across Wirral and Merseyside with workshops and programmes of Forest School and nature-connected activities. Grow-Wellbeing staff are experienced and qualified Forest School leaders and Outdoor Learning Practitioners, knowledgeable about how the natural environment can provide:

  • opportunities to deliver forest school type provision outdoors;
  • health and wellbeing benefits to children with additional learning needs;
  • support for children in need of post-SATS or covid recovery wellbeing
  • an alternative environment for children requiring complementary forest education.
  • opportunities for facilitation of ‘creativity in the forest’ (see workshop info below)
  • family workshops, which encourage parents to support and follow their children’s interests;

Workshops and Programmes are co-designed by Grow-Wellbeing together with each school or nursery, taking account of the needs of the school and the environment available.

Schools can book a “Creativity in the forest” environment themed workshop led by GROW Wellbeing view details here.

What else can we all do to protect our environment?

12 top tips from our friends at GROW Wellbeing CIC:

  1. Connect with nature more – go walking, exploring, in parks and in woods, or to a forest school
  2. Encourage more wildlife – build a bug house, make bird feeders
  3. Create hedgehog highways through fences so hedgehogs can move between gardens
  4. Plant bulbs and wildflowers, and grow your own vegetables
  5. Plant lots more trees to absorb carbon in the atmosphere
  6. Put less rubbish in landfill – the less that goes into landfill the better for the earth
  7. Separate organic food waste to make compost
  8. Recycle non-recyclable plastics by making eco bricks
  9. Before throwing things away – can you recycle/ reusing/ upcycle/ repair?
  10. Avoid buying single use plastic bottles – use refillable bottles instead
  11. Say no to fast fashion – buy clothes that will last longer and are not just a season’s fashion, which are then discarded
  12. Use public transport rather than take your car…. walk and cycle rather than take public transport.

Participating schools can also visit our resources page for more useful information about the environment.

What are dot-art, the arts organisation which manages dot-art Schools, doing to help the planet?

dot-art have been working hard to reduce our carbon footprint as well as developing green focused art projects to help influence the public’s attitudes and behaviours towards the planet. At dot-art we passionately believe that we all need to play our part in addressing the climate crisis. We are taking a two pronged approach to sustainability; learning, monitoring and changing our own habits and practices as an organisation, whilst also developing and managing a range of green focused art projects to help influence the public’s attitudes and behaviours towards the planet.

We are part of the Ecologi community who fund the world’s best climate crisis solutions. It’s now common knowledge that one of the best tools to tackle the climate crisis and keep our temperatures from rising above 1.5C is to plant trees. As a climate positive workforce, we are offsetting all of the carbon we produce as employees, we have also opted for an additional plan which offsets all of the carbon that our website generates on an annual basis, planting a minimum of 432 trees per year and removing at least 42 tonnes of CO2.  Our current total for the dot-art forest is 1729 trees planted! Read more about dot-art’s sustainability here.

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