We have been working hard on our easyas12tree project; check it out on easyas 1 2 3.com.
Wishing the school community a very happy Christmas and 2017. Enjoy looking over our archive of green events below.
Super news! We have won our Fifth Green Flag!!!!!; also we can buy a pennant with this one, so everybody will know we have so many flags!
Mí Márta, 2016
Bhí an-am againn i rith seachain na Gaeilge! Bhí ríl againn....! We are currently putting together our application for our Flag for Biodiversity! Good luck everybody! Super news; we have been picked as one of the top twenty schools in the country in the ONE GOOD IDEA campaign, being run by SEAI. Wow! We are putting forward our PLANT A FOREST ARE idea. Let Orla Farrell know any ideas you might have for our presentation to be ready in March! You can go over to the blog page and fill out the survey, then fill in your ideas. Maybe someone else in your family would do the survey as well and have other ideas. Creativity, so important!
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Thinking Green...not just for Halloween!https://youtu.be/_G1jF9OXtoY
We are in the thick of a new year of green endeavours!
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As a change from birdwatching, we took a day to picnic on Baldoyle estuary, at the Burrow Beach.
We are joining in National Walk to School week this week. Our aim is to have 20,000 children walk on Wednesday. Getting some air coming to school promotes good health and concentration. An hour of exercise a day is what is recommended nowadays, kicking off a summer day with a walk gets things off to a great start for adults and children.
Your child can look up yr.no (http://www.yr.no/place/Ireland/Leinster/Dublin/hour_by_hour.html)
or Met Eireann http://www.met.ie/latest/rainfall_radar.asp
to check if an umbrella or Wellies will be needed . To encourage this we are taking tonight off written homework to celebrate winning the Golden Boot AGAIN last week. In addition anybody who walks, scoots, cycles, parks-and-strides or gets off the bus early enough for a little walk can have that night off written work.
P.S. We have been enjoying videos online from gonoodle.com this week. They are good fun and free if you feel like a bit of break from sitting down on a wet day!We are really looked forward to our visit from Storyteller and Biodiversity Workshop leader, Dale Treadwell. He told us stories and helped us with our plan to plant native trees in the Junior School! Dale was responsible for the grove of Native trees planted in the Senior School some ten years ago as well as our native hedgerow. Here is some information about the type of work he did on his visit on Friday, January 30th, when he will visit the Junior School in the morning and the Senior School in the afternoon.
Reminder to all; Green Flag Meetings will be held at 9.30 a.m. Tuesdays 2015. in the Junior School; see noticeboard for the next dates. We are working on an Action Plan.
WOW - WE HAVE PLANTED IRELAND'S FIRST MICROFOREST on the model shown in TED. It is not yet quite 10m squared, we await our evergreen new trees, to arrive shortly!
Thanks to An Taisce who have included an article on their website all about our recent flag raising! Click here to see some great snaps of the day.
WELCOME TO THE GREEN SCHOOL PAGES OF ST. LAURENCE SCHOOL,
BALDOYLE.
We launched these pages at Halloween, 2014. Hope you enjoy them. They are a work in progress, managed by Orla Farrell with lots of help from the Green Committee and the whole school community. Please let me know if you spot anything that needs fixing. If you hover over the "Green Schools" heading above you will see some categories that may interest you. Our newest flag is Biodiversity, we will be welcoming it in between now and March 2016. The school is simply humming with activity and it is all being watched carefully from the garden by our new scarecrow which was built on Oct 20th by Marjorie Matthews with help from First Class during our art class. Well done to all! Bring her in a costume if you spot something appropriate and of course, recycled!
Reel Science Film Competition - we have sent in our great new film; Click on the orange name to watch it! Thanks to Sustainable Energy Ireland and An Taisce who have included it on their websites.
"Follow the First Class Gardeners".
We put up this link on Green Flag Day when the Mayor of Fingal came to raise our fourth green flag; Wednesday, 22nd October.
Our thanks to all who helped to make our Green Flag raising a success! We had an electric car for the Mayor from ESB ecars. Orla Farrell will brought her electric car also. Windsor Motors provided a third electric car on the day for people who would like to test drive a Nissan Leaf. Nissan Ireland with a fourth car. Wow! Four electric cars in a row! Members of the Green Committee with their family, CIAN AND HANNAH DONNELLAN went for a spin as a special prize arranged by Electric Ireland ecars! Cianrefused a trip in a Ferrari because he would miss the Green Committee meeting!
Aine O Loughlen, An Taisce education officer was also in attendance!
We were so happy to welcome Aine, who was such a huge support to us, always first at the WOW morning events!
Here was the draft programme for the 22nd:
11 a.m. The Mayor raises the green flag for sustainable travel at the St. Laurence Junior School Campus, Grange Road, Baldoyle (opposite Lidl).
This day will be a SUPERWOW day. The school community will all endeavour to come to school in a sustainable way on that day.
11.20 a.m. Premiere of the short film, "Follow the First Class Gardeners", which has been entered this week for the Reel Science National Film competition. The Junior School Green Committee will be in attendance.
11.40 a.m. Launch of the new Green School webpages
11.45 Committee members walk to the Senior School
The Mayor will visit Junior classrooms
11.55 Parade of Electric cars departs the Junior School for the Senior School, bringing the Mayor and representatives of the School Community.
12.00 noon Raising of flag at the Senior School building, Brookstone Road, Baldoyle and address by the Mayor. The Mayor will be introduced by Edwina Dunford, Education Officer of Fingal County Council.
12.30 The Mayor is looking forward to meeting staff of the Senior School over tea and coffee in the staff room.
We enjoy fruit in the staffroom...now what is that one on the left???
We hope you like our Green Flag Home Page. We are very proud of all the work done by the whole school community and our many partners who come to help; we are now working on our fifth flag for Biodiversity. Below is a taste of some of our work. There are some new faces and some older ones! Go to our Biodiversity page for all our newest news; The visit of the Mayor on Wednesday 22nd October, our entry to the Reel Science film competition and some of our favourite new films!
Our school is hopping with Biodiversity all of a sudden! Ms. Foley has some fantastic experiments going on. Do woodlice prefer light or dark? Damp or dry? Ask her class, the woodlice are camping in various dishes of earth on teachers' desk.
Also thanks to Dayna Carr for bringing in her rescued toad, found in the middle of the road, prior to releasing it. We filmed it the large courtyard in case you missed it and we will put up the link soon.
Hey everybody, it's time to shake a leg! Time for school!
We won the National Repak award for Schools for the video we made in first class with the Green Committee and many in our school community about how we manage waste in school; Refuse, Reduce, Re-use, Recycle, Repair. Hope you like watching it as much as we liked making it. Santa came in an Electric Vehicle with our prize; an ipad and other treats! An Taisce very kindly put it on their page, to inspire other schools working towards their Green Flags.
We raise our GREEN FLAG for TRAVEL this week. We have already earned three others! Keep up the good work everybody and remember, there is no such thing as an accident. They are all preventable. Take care on the roads. Attention motorists!
We joined National Cycling Week....we are so lucky to have two new bike storage facilities. Thank you to An Taisce who put them up over the summer breaks with speed and efficiency and what a treat, at zero cost to our school! Zero is one of our favourite "numbers".
Maths in Action with teacher Claire Finnerty; How far is it to walk to the sea, using the trundle wheel? Not far at all! So have a coat for school, we love to go out and about and see what's happening, even if it's just a trip across the road to our Senior building and see how their garden grows.
Remember a coat and you can always go outside for some fun and fresh air! We go out a lot during the day to enjoy our beautiful area but we never mind a shower or a bit of rain when we are well wrapped up!
Birdwatching and our cleanup of the Prom. We like to leave places better than we found them.
We love to visit Baldoyle library, it is brilliant! And free! (Zero again...)They are so good to us and read us stories. We got to see the council chamber and look out over the estuary. We brought binoculars to spot the birds.
We are working now to earn our flag for BIODIVERSITY. We started working towards our green flags in November, 2005 and over this time we have won flags for Litter and Waste Management, Energy Conservation, Water Management and Travel. Enjoy our journey with us to winning our FIFTH FLAG! We need to apply by the end of March 2016 so we are working to a deadline! Let us know if you can help!
First Joint Flag is Awarded to St. Laurence School
Joanna Coughlan and Orla Farrell, with two schoolchildren representatives attend the award ceremony at the Helix to collect our fourth Green Flag for Travel, the first award to be collected by our newly amalgamated school. Since then we've got motoring on gathering ideas for our Biodiverse Garden. Do you see anything we could copy below?
Can you spot a zero-emissions vehicle above?
Have you ever seen an ELECTRIC VEHICLE? You might not know it, they look very like an ordinary car.
But they only cost a fraction of the cost to run.
Here is one of our very many trips to the Ecology Centre, Sonairte. We have visited on 5 occasions with Junior classes, over the 10 years spanning 2005 - 2015. Because of this the school community has a first-rate understanding of green issues, as we focus on each trip on the topic under investigation for each flag.
Who can solve the problems we have on Planet Earth?
Take a look in the mirror!
Who can solve the problems we have on Planet Earth?
Take a look in the mirror!
We planted this stand of Native Trees at the Senior school a few years ago. It is very useful for cutting down noise and cleaning pollution from traffic on the road. How much have they grown since this picture was taken? And what about these boys who were in First Class then in the former St. Peter & Paul's BNS? This was our e-Christmas card this year, it cut down on paper!
The noticeboard above with the question marks was our first ever noticeboard. Our aim was to start asking questions to find out just where we were; e.g. how were we managing our Litter and Waste? Well we found out that we were not the worst but there were lots of problems for our Green Team to solve.