By VICTORIA STONE-MEADOWS
MILLWARRA Primary School in Millgrove participated in Environment Week by organising green thumb activities around the school.
The aim of Environment Week is to teach students how they can support and care for the environment at a personal level.
They achieved this through activities like weeding, mulching, pruning, and planting as well as having lights and heaters off inside the building to reduce CO2 production.
The activities were designed so students could gain landcare and environmental responsibility skills they can take home and apply to other areas of their lives.
Cool Australia also provided the school with figures to calculate how much CO2 the trees in the school grounds absorbed.
Teacher at Millwarra and organiser for the day Trish Snowden said the day was a great success.
“It was really good,” she said
“It was a great day, and we got lots done and the children were pretty excited about the amount they managed to do.”
The school was provided with 140 trees, funded by Yarra Ranges Shire and supplied by Yarra Valley ECOSS.
“We were given 140 trees and we managed to plant most of those,” Ms Snowden said.
The school also assessed their levels of waste and conducted a waste audit with the support of an environmental officer from the Yarra Ranges Shire.
Ms Snowden said the waste audit was a highlight of the day as the school was already meeting some great standards of waste management.
“She was really impressed with how little landfill our school produced and how much composting we do,” Ms Snowden said.
Not only did the students at the school get a chance to plant and care for plants, but they had a chance to do some garden design as well.
“We had two loads of mulch delivered with everything else, and the children planned and built a path.”
“It was already a passage they used previously to run through the garden, so we thought why not turn that into an actual path,” Ms Snowden said.
Ms Snowden and the Millwarra Primary School community would like to thank the shire of Yarra Ranges, Yarra Valley ECOSS and all the members of the community that made the day possible.
