2nd Eco Committee Meeting and Tallinn European School visit

 


Our Eco Committee met for the second time this school year. The meeting agenda and minutes can be found here.

On the afternoon we hosted visitors from the Eco Committee of the Tallinn European school. The 7th graders showed them around the school vicinity, introducing our Energy Track and our back yard for outdoor lessons.

9th Graders having a Physics lesson on the specific heat capacity outdoors as part of an Outdoor Classroom Day



Later on, the Eco Committees of the two schools, T.E.S (Tallinn European School) and T.I.S (Tartu International School) met to exchange experience and ideas on the Eco-Schools activities. Thank you, Artur, for leading the meeting! And thank you T.E.S. members for your fresh ideas and lovely gifts.


T.E.S & T.I.S Eco Committees meet-up

Some ideas that started to resonate on the common meeting:

* Having challenges (for example on how active the students can be the Energy Track, or perhaps on noticing and picking up rubbish around the school) is an engaging way to involve students.

* Having indoor shoes can also help to save the planet! When planning the meeting, the information on indoor shoes was overlooked, but luckily our guests were open minded and did not mind walking around in our tidy schoolhouse in their socks. Thank you for this! And thank you also for being principled enough to refuse the plastic shoe covers offered to the visitors - a small step toward a plastic free environment. I really hope the students of our school see a connection here between their own choice of either bringing the mud in or not, and the ways how it can be good for our own environment both on site and beyond.

* We still have a long way to go when it comes to minimizing waste on different school events - how to sort and first of all avoid the waste in the first place. Yes - on our meeting we could enjoy home-made apple juice, but the cookies still came from plastic packages ;(

* The Eco Committees in both schools could be made more visible by introducing their activities on the school assemblies.

* A nice lapsus linguae opened up a broader view to the actions of the Eco Committee. Instead of a committee, many times the word community was used; and this actually is what we should aim at - bringing up a school-wide (and even more) community of people who really care about the nature and our environment. Eco Committee can start the ideas but it is us all who would have to act according to the sustainable principles day by day.

* And last but not least - a very tangible idea of a Good Ideas Box. So that all the members of the school / kindergarten community can post their good ideas on what changes or good practices could the Eco Committee initiate.




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