SW Biodiversity - the nice things you can see on the way to work.

Beautiful Orchids

Kangaroo Paws

I left my bike in the office and so I walked into work.  Its a lovely sunny day and I found these beautiful examples of our biodiversity along the way, just at the edge of the road.  Nice...

Know your Place - Great new Biodiversity Science module

We've got a new science module up on our website 'Know your Place'.  Yey.  It was developed with Trish Gardener, who's got a huge knowledge of local flora and fauna and conservation issues around WA. 

2010 is the year of Biodiversity and thats what this module is all about.  That and getting out of the classroom and looking after your locality.   Its centred around fieldwork to measure the biodiversity of a bushland or wetland area near your school.  These areas are likely to have experienced many different impacts form people just walking over the area, possible littering to fire, invasive species and clearing.  Students assess these and work out ways to help improve the biodiversity of the site and manage it better.  We are hoping that classes/schools will find and adopt sites near them and be able to take on atleast some of mananagement activities.  This could involve producing information boards, setting up volunteer groups or just clearing litter. 

We've produced all the materials you need to teach it along with a fieldwork booklet and other worksheets for the students.

The module also examines why biodiversity is important, allows them to play the ABC's excellent Catchment Detox game putting their ideas into practice on a large scale, uses the a dilemma (see my post about them here) and ends by looking at the importance of biodiversity in agriculture using the 'Seed Hunter' video.

Let us know how you go with teaching it, remember we're giving away $50 every month in our feedback draw.  Go to this site to answer questions and be automatically entered.  (see this post for more details)

Beaches & bags

Just watch this fantastic video about the life of a plastic bag.  I know it doesn't sound good but it really is one of the best short films I've seen.

It would be a fanastic resource to use to explore issues of sustainability and waste in many areas.  I think it provides a great way in to English, very obviously media studies as the filming, imagery and story are very striking. It could also fit into religious education or philosophy as well as Society and Environment.



Here's the synopsis:

This short film by American director Ramin Bahrani (Goodbye Solo) traces the epic, existential journey of a plastic bag (voiced by Werner Herzog) searching for its lost maker, the woman who took it home from the store and eventually discarded it. Along the way, it encounters strange creatures, experiences love in the sky, grieves the loss of its beloved maker, and tries to grasp its purpose in the world.

In the end, the wayward plastic bag wafts its way to the ocean, into the tides, and out into the Pacific Ocean trash vortex — a promised nirvana where it will settle among its own kind and gradually let the memories of its maker slip away.

This video could be combined with a clean up.  I've just found out about the organisation Tangaroa Blue at www.oceancare.org.au.  They are focussed on cleaning up coasts, getting rid of all the plastic waste that endangers wildlife and generally makes the coast look rubbish.  They help organise clean ups across australia.  Students can take part, record what they collect and send their data Tangaroa to be included in their research projects.  Tongara Blue have also produced some teaching resoruces to go with this for schools in WA.  Contact them for the CD.  Its called Ocean Full of Plastic: marine debris education resource for WA schools.  There's a beach clean up for the SW organised for the 8th & 9th October if you want to get involved.

I've also found a podcast from Costing the Earth about this too.  Dr. Alice Roberts investigates the discovery of the World's largest plastic waste patch in the South Atlantic and asks what we can do to solve the problem of aqatic plastic.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00v1qtn

Lots of links to other great resources about this issue on this page too. 

The grass is always greener

Not just greener, there actually is some grass. Richard took this picture near Donnybrook.

Which cows would you rather be????

Not that difficult to answer. Which cows would you rather eat?

Crowded, no grass, eating grain and lying down (maybe the heat from the earth or because of the grain they eat instead of grass?) or walking around unstressed, grazing? Hmmmm

Sometimes a picture speaks a thousand words

Fun and Inspiration at the Weekend

David and Skye in Action. Skye liked the dancing book.

Ingrid spreads the word. Giving away packets of coriander seeds hleped too.

We had a fantastic weekend at the Hulbert Street Sustainability Fiesta. Ingrid and I shared duties on our stand over the weekend, David and Skye helped me out ;) and Tundi (?), Ingrid's daughter had organised a fashion remodelling/recycling area futher up the street and had made herself a great outfit. Maybe Ingrid can post a photo?

I really enjoyed hearing how enthusiastic people were about what we are doing with Schools. You would hope they would be at a Sustainability fiesta but nonetheless people were eager to talk to us and very encouraging.  Our coriander seeds ran out and the leaflet stock was depleted. We got quite a few names on our living library list too. This is a new idea which I hope we will develop over the next few months so thank you to those that signed up, I'll be writing more to you soon.

So many people there doing great work. Shani and Tim of course for organising it all, opening their house and accomodation at the Painted Fish and generally getting people in their community on board.

Its down that way, no up that way! So many things going on it was hard to keep track.

I had some good conversations with Helen and Tim at Sustainable Energy Now. I'm impressed by their campaigning. Some good stats in their brochure....did you know that if just a quarter of homes currently supplied by synergy got a 1.5kw solar system this creates as much energy as the current coal fired power genration in WA. The friendly people at Fern community gardens opposite also signed up to our living library.

I loved the 'recycled' bikes. I've got a groovy rusty blue retro one myslef and was pretty inspired to try turning it into one that I could carry Skye in. Here's a just one of the many creations.

Guerrilla gardening was in evidence. Not sure if the chickens stay out on the verge all the time but the vegetables in the verge looked (and hopefully taste) great. So sculptural.
















I and many other people I noticed brought a rug from carpetsforcommunities.org.  Great little rugs made from recyled t shirt off cuts by women in Cambodia and all profits go directly to them. The stand was run by volunteers. I even got a photo of my rug being made. Its now cheering up our bathroom. If you're going to buy things then I can't think of a better type of enterprise to buy them from.

Loads of stuff for kids, the HotRockers to be; fairy gardens, exercise bikes to generate electricity with, music, costumes. I was really impressed by the model sustainable houses built by Year 6s. We've got a similar model building exercise as the finale to our Global Warming:Global Warning module (see the lesson 'What's the plan?). Its for slightly older students and I have to say I think its a great learning activity at any age. Really creative, allows them to express their ideas and its hands on and practical, makes a change from writing it all up in an essay.

Students from some of our schools were picking out their friends in our photos and other people were happy to find out what their old school was doing for sustainability.

I could go on and on. Can't wait till next year. I'll leave you with my favourite costume.

Hulbert Street Sustainability Fiesta

We are off to the Hulbert Street Sustainability Fiesta in Fremantle this weekend. We've got a stand, I've been making posters, Shae's been making up cute packets of HotRock coriander seeds to give away and we're hoping to meet loads of great people who want to help us make sustainability real in Schools and just generally to be inspired by whats going on.

Looks like the whole Hotrock team might get to be there all together too!!! 1st ime in our History. We've got our Tshirts, just got to go there.

The sun should be shining, think it will be an inspiring weekend. See you there..... Lucy

Want to win $50?

Feedback Competition

We want to make your life easier and provide you with great resources that save you time, that you enjoy teaching, that engage your classes and get your pupils thinking and acting for sustainability. We hope we are doing this but need your feedback so that we can improve what we offer and reach more teachers. We know that this takes time and effort on your part so we’ve come up with a plan to reward your generosity.

Win a $50 voucher from ecostore www.todae.com

How to enter.

1. Download and teach one of the lessons from our website.
2. Answer our feedback questions – online or email.
3. Put your name and email address on it to be entered into our monthly draw.

How to improve your chances of winning.

1. Teach more than one lesson and fill out a form for each.

2. Enter every month, we will draw on the last day of the month.

We welcome all feedback; positive, negative, new ideas or adaptations. We want to improve what we are doing and produce lessons that you really want to teach and that are easy and practical for you to access and implement.

Save time and answer online.

Or email hotrock@thehotrock.org.au and answer the following questions

• Which module and or lessons did you use?

• Which year and type of class did you use it with?
• Please write any comments about; how you used it, adapted it, any problems you had with it, what you & students enjoyed (or not) etc.
• Was it easy to find the lessons, topics etc that you wanted? Any suggestions to improve the usability of our website?
• Are there any other topics, types of resources, services that you think we can provide to help you educate for sustainability?
• Thanks for your help. If you’d like to be entered into a monthly draw to win a $50 voucher to shop at www.todae.com please give you name and email address here:

Name: Email:

We're giving you a head start for the 1st draw which will take place on 31st October.

That's 6 weeks to get teaching and feeding back to us (well 2 weeks hols but you could do the feedback then).