The
2011 Winners

Wales/West - Regional Winner & UK Champions 2011

Castle Park Primary School, Caldicot
Project Title: Madagascar

Castle Park Primary School produced an immense volume of work on the endangered rainforest and wildlife of Madagascar, which included raising over £1,000 for a charity providing environmental education to Malagasy children living in the rainforest, a set of TV reports filmed in a real TV studio, a beautiful folder of research work, a stunning patchwork Malagasy flag, which incorporates collages of Malagasy animal species and a set of 'habitat boxes' - shoe boxes which have their own built-in lighting, which illuminates dioramas of different Malagasy habitats that the children have created.

But the children didn't want to stop at simply learning about the wildlife, they wanted to help preserve it too! Having won some prize money at last year's Total Green School Awards they put it to good use, with both year 6 classes given £150 and the task of choosing where to spend it! This resulted in them adopting a hawksbill marine turtle and a Billy, a ring-tailed lemur, as well as them making donations to other worthwhile causes. As 2011 was declared by the UN the "International Year of the Forest" it seemed even more appropriate to the children that they should focus on tropical rainforests and deforestation. They went on to hold their own classroom discussion and set up a Wiki forum to encourage “virtual” discussion about the wildlife and deforestation too.

All in all the children of Castle Park primary school did a thorough investigation into so many aspects of Madagascar and creatively demonstrated their passion for the island, as well as making a real contribution to preserving it for future generations.

Scotland - Regional Winner

Salen Primary School
Project Title: Food, Farming, Fishing, Foresty & Fun

The environment has become integral to learning at Salen Primary School, as their project demonstrated. The children have taken part in all kinds of work in the school grounds, including growing potatoes and sweet potatoes in containers made from old car tyres (the best part of this was harvesting and eating them!), keeping a photo diary of the seasons in the school gardens, creating new habitats for hedgehogs, bats and minibeasts and making nestboxes and food for wild birds.

Recycling is second nature to the children and they have enjoyed visits to learn about other habitats in their locality, such as Fishnish Forest. It has been truly inspiring to see how environmentally aware the children of Salen Primary School are and this made them worthy winners of their TOTAL Green School Award.

South / Central - Regional Winner

Normanton on Soar Primary, near Loughborough.
Project Title: Eco Art Enrichment Week

Normanton on Soar Primary held a brilliant 'Eco Arts Enrichment Week' during which every class in the school was involved in creating art to express their views of the environment. These included 'wish stars', where some of the younger people depicted their ideas for the future of the planet along with the reality as they saw it of today, creating artwork and animations using recycled materials and even a spectacular 'Angel of Normanton', a huge human form created entirely from recycled rubbish. They worked with all kinds of recycled materials, including metals, using wires to create sculptures and making brilliant badges from old bottle tops, plastics, cardboard and textiles, with which they made felt brooches. The children also wrote and performed the 'Normanton Rap'!

North - Regional Winner

Middleton St Mary's Primary School, Leeds
Project Title: Woodlands Community Garden

Middleton St Mary's Primary School have a wonderful Community Garden that has been created by the children and their families. Key areas include a new wildflower meadow, a large-scale daffodil planting (each pupil gave a daffodil to their mother for mother's day, while other daffodil flowers were dissected to enable learning about life processes), vegetable growing areas and a bird hide that the children themselves have decorated. Their outdoors experience has inspired lessons and art work across the school from learning about frogs to identifying and painting the birds they have been encouraging and can now observe from the bird hide they've made and decorated. In fact, the effects of working in the school garden have spread far and wide beyond the classroom. One pupil called William was inspired to design a garden, which was installed at the Royal Horticultural Society's Garden at Harlow Carr, North Yorkshire and raised money for the charity Help the Heroes. Meanwhile David designed a postcard for the HESCO garden at the Chelsea Flower Show. The work in the Woodlands Community Garden is ongoing, whether its mulching, weeding or clearing areas of litter. They've also gone on to grow their own food such as peas, tomatoes, courgettes and sweetcorn in their newly erected poly tunnel. The results of all these efforts have been so inspiring that pupils from the local high school have even visited, to get ideas for their school garden.

Luss Primary School won £500 in the 'Totally Clued-Up' category of the Scottish awards for helping to save the almost extinct Powan fish. To do this children aged 7 - 11 kept eggs in a tank in their classroom at a constant temperature until they hatched, then released them back into Loch Lomond. Click here to watch a great video by URTV with kids from the project explaining what they got up to.

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