The past three weeks, starting fresh after New Year, we have picked up to work for the green flag from Landvernd/FEE.http://landvernd.is/graenfaninn  

First we considered what is necessary for us to live, food, air, water, energy and the fact that all we need comes from the earth and goes back to the earth. Then we split the group in 1st-5th grade and 6th-10th grade. The younger kids have been reading stories about recycling and waste, and went to our neighbouring kindergarten to interview the staff about how they earned the green flag.

 The older kids watched the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYnTmgnUmmo, became our environmental committee and chose two themes from the checklist of green steps in the Green Flag project. We went over the checklist Energy and Water and Going Green in our School Environment. We discovered what we did already well and what we could improve.

For example in the checklist for School Environment, we scored yes for:

• - Students and staff wear no shoes or indoor shoes when in school.
• - All chemical and dangerous materials are kept in a safe place
• - We stress a healthy environment and have good airing/heat, healthy snacks.
• - Regularly we pick up trash on the school grounds.

What we can improve is to make our school grounds more diverse, and fun. We intend to grow more plants in the spring and to work on an artistic facelift of the school. Learn more about the natural environment of our school, as we are close to the sea and botanical gardens. We could inquire if pesticides are used by the gardening company who tends the grounds and encourage them not to.

Since it is still winter we decided to make strings of peanuts for birds and bird feeders to attract birds around us.

The group who chose the Energy and Water checklist discovered:

We do ok for:

• - Keeping heat indoors by drawing curtains overnight.
• - Using Energy saving lights.  

We could do better for turning off lights when there is nobody in a room, and shutting down computers, printers and appliences when not in use. Saving water by not letting tabs run unnecessarily. The teens decided to have a non-electricity day to have fun and make us all aware of our energy use. They have written a small blog about this under the theme blog. We intend to teach and learn more about how electricity is produced and what kind of energy saving lightbulbs and appliences are available.

So far so good, Lilianne