Our Lady of Good Counsel
Boys National School
Green School Committee – Working Together for a Sustainable Future
Green Schools is an environmental management and education programme for schools, working together for a sustainable future.
Promoting long-term, whole-school action for the environment, Green-Schools is a student-led programme with involvement from the wider community. The programme is operated and coordinated by the Environmental Education Unit of An Taisce (FEE member for Ireland).
Mission
Green Schools mission is to protect planet Earth.
Our Committee
Our Green School committee, consisting of student representatives from 3rd to 6th class, has been in operation for many years within our school.
To date we have earned the following flags:
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Litter & Waste
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Energy
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Water
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Travel – Committee secured funding for our Covered Cycle & Scooter Parking
Events & Activities promoted through the year:
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Recycling & Upcycling of Paper
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Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Poster Competition
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DLR Recycled Christmas Tree Decoration Competition – Overall 2nd place in Dec. 2024
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Water Watchers – assigned in each class to ensure taps are turned off
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Energy Savers – assigned in each class to turn off lights & electrics at break times
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Walk to School Week
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Scoot to School Week
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Cycle to School Week
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Clean Air Week – Poster Competition & No Power Hour
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National Tree Week – Promotion of Lessons & Activities
In addition to engaging in activities to maintain our existing flags, we are currently working on our Biodiversity Flag.
Biodiversity in Our School
Our school slogan, based on a competition run from 1st to 6th class and decided upon by our committee is:
Biodiverse should come first,
Help us fix our Wildlife’s thirst,
Save our Plant NOW,
Or our Future goes Kappow!!!
We are fortunate to have extensive biodiverse habitats within our school grounds. This has been cultivated over many years of hard work by our School Caretaker and our Gardening Club (Staff & Students).
Some of our awards include:
2019 Best School for Supporting Biodiversity
2018 2nd Place Tidy Schools
2017 2nd Place Tidy Schools
2016 Overall Winner Tidy Schools
2014 1st Place Tidy Schools
2015 Best School for Supporting Biodiversity
Our committee, within their Biodiversity school survey, documented the following habitats and Harry Keegan and Adam Burke (both 4th class) have done a fantastic job of drawing all of this information on a Habitat Map:
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Woodland Garden – Large variety of different trees
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40 Year Garden
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Insect Hotels / Log-piles
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Bird Houses / Bird Baths
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Log-pile
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Bat Boxes
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Pond – Fish and Frogs
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Butterfly Wildflower Garden
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Bee Pollinator Garden
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Fruit Trees – Apple, Pear & Plum
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Summer fruits
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Vegetable Patch
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Butterfly / Bee - garden growing plants to support these insects
7 Step Programme
For each flag our Green School Committee, actively engage with the An Taisce 7 Step Programme.
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Green School Committee
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Environmental Review
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Action Plan
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Monitoring & Evaluation
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Curriculum Work
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Involving & Informing
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Green Code (Slogan)
Walk to School Week 19th to 23rd September
Last week was Walk to School week, with Wednesday being National Walk to School Day.
Our new Green School Committee were very busy organising and promoting the event starting the previous week. The sun shone brightly each day (except Thursday) and it was great to see so many of our boys either ‘Walking to School’ or engaging in a ‘Park and Stride’.
The Green School Committee boys visited the classes from Junior Infants up to 6th class, each morning, to carry out their survey to determine our daily totals of the number of boys who walked all or some of the way to school.
On National Walk to School Day (Wednesday 21st Sept.), our totals were:
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Walked: 156 boys
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Park & Stride: 79 boys
Figures gathered throughout the week showed:
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Walked: 725
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Park & Stride: 371
A wonderful achievement! Well done to all our boys who participated throughout the week.
Much work was done in school discussing the many benefits of walking and the boys’ observations as they walked to school. Things they saw, heard and anything that they had not noticed before.
Mrs. Sheehan’s / Ms. Morrissey’s 4th class took on the ‘Investigate & Create Challenge’, which involved a deeper investigation & analysis of their journey to school. This included observations regarding; Safe Crossing, Driver Behaviour, Litter and Traffic. They plan to work in groups to produce a ‘News Today’ style video of their findings. This certainly pulls together many aspects of learning; SPHE (Health & Wellbeing), SESE (Care for our Environment), English (Oral Language), Maths (Data Analysis), Drama and ICT.
To round up our ‘Walk to School’ week, our Dun Laoghaire Rathdown Green Schools Officer (Sarah McEllistrem) arrived on Friday with the ‘Walk to School’ banner above, which shows our Green School Co-ordinator Mrs. Sheehan and our Green School Committee boys (Leo, Darragh, Zac, Luke, Blaine, Mason, Kobi and Sam). The Green School Committee were delighted to receive official badges, pencils and high-viz school bag tags and a supply of ‘Walk to School’ stickers to give to all the boys who walked to school.
Walking to school has many benefits; chatting with friends, healthy exercise for the heart & strengthening bones, happier mood and improved ability to focus in class.
Our Green School Committee will actively promote WOW (Walk on Wednesdays) throughout the school year.
Well done to all who participated and a big thank you to our Green School Committee for all their work in organising and running the event.
