Keeping Brightside Green

The Green Team

The Green Team at Brightside NI School have a special job to help Miss Jones, Miss Buck and Mrs Beck to take care of the environment in and around school.  The Green Team meet every two weeks to discuss ideas, plans and do jobs around school! Please see the action plan below to find out our plans for this year or see our Eco-Board display in the hall for more information. 

Green Team 2024/25

Check back soon to find out who the new Green Team are for this academic year, and to see our exciting plans for the year ahead!

Green Team 2023/24

Autumn 1 - This half term the y1 and y2 pupils have applied to become part of the Green Team. Miss Parker and Miss Buck were super impressed with all of the application forms, and they chose 2 pupils from each Key Stage 1 class (photo coming soon!). The Green Team are very excited to get started and help improve our school grounds and environment. The children met with Miss Buck and Miss Parker to discuss their roles around school, and share ideas for the following academic year. During the first meeting, we discussed the importance of preventing food waste to link to learning about harvest time throughout school. 

Autumn 2 - This half term the Green Team met with Miss Buck and Miss Parker to discuss their roles in school. They decided that to help our environment and save electricity they would become Light Monitors for their classrooms and switch off the lights when no one is in the classroom. The Green Team also thought about ways they could reduce the amount of litter around our school grounds by becoming Litter Monitors. The children tick off their jobs once completed on our Eco-School display board in the hall. The Green Team have also organised a litter pick to help tidy up the school playground after the Christmas Fair next week using our new litter pickers donated to school by a local business! 

Spring 1 - This half term the Green Team met to start planning Green Week and think about ideas that each class could do to raise awareness of looking after our environment and ways that we can help our planet. The Green Team have also started designing and making posters to display around school to encourage and remind other children to turn off the taps when finished, recycle, and ensure all food waste gets put in the bin after playtime. We have also been keeping an eye on our travel trackers to see if we can improve the number of children walking, cycling, scooting or doing park and stride each week. The Green Team will be monitoring the results at the end of the travel tracker programme.

Spring 2 - This half term the Green Team have completed another litter pick to ensure our school environment is kept clean and safe. The children have also been thinking about how we can use recycled products in our learning at school, for example, the Year 1 children made Tudor houses using recycled boxes and how we can use them to make products in DT. The Green Team will be starting to think about plans to improve our school garden area in the next few weeks e.g. planting seeds and bulbs, tidying the garden and fixing the Bug Hotel as we approach spring. 

Summer 1 - This half term some of our pupils have planted some beautiful plants around school. Miss Parker has started Forest School after school club with some children. Miss Buck is leading a gardening after school club with some Y1 children; so far the children have planted some new seeds in the school garden and made some bird feeders to hang in the trees to attract wildlife. The Green Team have planned and organised a whole school plant growing competition!

2022/2023

Over the 2022/2023 academic year, we continued to develop our projects such as the School Garden and the Outdoor Woodland Area.

We elected a Green Team! The Green team met with Miss Buck and Miss Parker, and helped her to take care of the school garden. They planted lots of seeds and bulbs and grew some delicious vegetables to eat. 

They have also been involved in a range of projects such as:

• Active Week
• Green Week/Community Week
• World Culture Day
• International Week  
• Developing our Outdoor Learning Area alongside business firms from the local community
• Monitors to help keep our school 'green' e.g. light monitor, plant monitor
• Forest Schools field area  
• Gardening after school club 
• Big Battery Hunt
• The Great Big School Clean Up 
• Walk to School Week 
• Volunteers from local businesses to help develop our School Garden and Forest School Area