Year 5 Street Dance at Bowker Vale!
Author Archives: Mrs Cooke
Eco Leaders visit Manchester City FA to see pond and wildlife areas.
The Eco Leaders were invited by the Director of sustainability to visit Manchester City Football Academy to look at the areas that they have developed from ‘brown’ waste land or industrial areas into ‘green’ areas. These once industrial factory sites now attract wildlife such as Bee’s and insects as well as other larger animals like birds, badgers and bats.
The director was really impressed with our Eco Leaders pond designs and we will be considering which options we are interested in for our own pond in the future.
We began the tour with presentation which showed us the difference between how the area used to look and how it looks now…
This is how it was 20 years ago…..
And how it looks today…
We then went on a tour around the grounds of the Academy and learnt lots of interesting things about how Manchester City have turned their ‘brown land’ site into a wildlife Oasis!
A Solitary Bee hotel…
Football pitches used by the women’s and youth teams.
Manchester City spelt in Bee hotels!
The very icy pond in the sunlight…
Log piles for Wildlife homes…
Beetle homes…
Bird feeders…
The huge Pine trees planted only 10 years ago!
The living wall – good chance for a group photograph!
We had such a fantastic welcome from Manchester City and learnt so much. We can’t wait to get started on our final pond designs!
Watch this space for more information soon…
5B Dog agility class with Buddy!
Today 5B really enjoyed a class with Mrs Jacques and Buddy, learning some dog agility training skills! Buddy was amazing and showed how clever he is at jumping, tunnels and weaving!
Eco Leaders get a visit from Manchester City’s Sustainability Organiser!
The Bowker Vale Eco Leaders won a prize for the Best Stall back in July, and we were lucky enough to win a visit from Pete Bradshaw, who organises Manchester City’s sustainability projects!
He met the whole team last Friday and had a look around our school grounds to see what areas we wanted to develop to become a more sustainable and carbon reducing school.
One thing the Eco Leaders have talked about for a while is developing an area for a pond – as we have some areas with excess water at times – and we would love to create a full life cycle ecosystem that would attract more wild life and grow plants that would help to reduce our carbon footprint.
So, the Eco Leaders are in the process of designing their own pond at the moment. When we have done this, we will visit some of the areas around the Manchester City academy grounds that Pete has helped to transform from industrial waste land or urban landscape into a green oasis of nature. This will give us ideas on how we can best develop our areas to encourage more biodiversity and increase carbon absorption. You will be able to see the best designs here on the blog when they are completed!
More information on this amazing transformation can be found at :
https://bowkervale.edublogs.org/files/2023/11/ManCity_Mancgroves_Deck_V03-1.pdf
5M Autumn Forest School
5M enjoyed their Autumn sessions exploring the stream and the forest, using the many fallen leaves to create a map of our forest school site and used tools (a Bow Saw and Bill Hook,) to saw and split green wood for the fire in the last session.
5B Forest school
Class 5B started their forest school this Autumn with some exploring around the forest, painting with mud and hot chocolate at the end!
Gardening Teams Harvest and sale
After several months of hard work during lunchtimes and after school – some of our vegetables had grown wonderfully over the summer holidays and we had so much, we decided to sell it after school.
Here are some phots from before the summer – and then after- so you can see the difference!
Thank you to all the children at lunchtimes who have helped with planting, weeding and watering to keep our veggies happy and healthy! We are hoping to continue through most of the winter and get ourselves ready for spring planting again!
Eco Leaders win best stall at Sustainability conference!
Some of the Eco leaders were invited to take part and run a stall at a Sustainability Conference and careers event at Connell Sixth form College, where there was a prize to be given out by Manchester City football club for best stall.
They took part in workshops about recycling, planting seeds and making protest banners and then ran their own stall on different soil types and invited people to choose and plant their own seed in a soil of their choice.
They did an amazing job, represented Bowker Vale really well and were thrilled to be announced as the Winners of the best stall prize! Fantastic job Eco Leaders!! Well done!
