On Tuesday 7th of November, our ‘Planet Protectors’ participated in a full day student workshop at Hills Christian Community School in Verdun where we engaged in a number of personal, environmental and sustainability learning activities.

After a half hour drive up the South Eastern Freeway, groups of Youth Environmental Leaders from across Adelaide met in a large shared space to make presentations about the different projects our schools had been working on throughout the year. One by one, each school group took turns to share the things they had done to make their school more sustainable including – improved waste management systems and education programs, vegetable/flower/bee/indigenous gardens, composting and worm farms, revegetation projects for improved biodiversity of native flora and fauna, installation of wildlife boxes and a range of grant availability and fundraising options.

After recess we enjoyed a guided tour of the school and we looked at their gardens and other projects they had completed over a number of years. Starting in different locations, small groups followed a set route guided by student leaders explaining the projects we visited. Locations we visited included the Frog Bog, Rivermont Indigenous Food Garden, Butterfly Garden and the newly created Native Bee Nature Garden.

Inside the Hills Christian Community School there was large muddy field the school had converted to a wetland with the support of a Green Adelaide Grant. We walked down to the wetland to investigate the aquatic macroinvertebrates living in this waterway. Invertebrates are animals without a backbone, macro means you can see it with the naked eye and aquatic means live in water. We filled flat trays with enough water to cover the bottom, then used a long handled net to capture any aquatic macroinvertebrates living the wetland. The contents of the net was emptied into the tray and we used small spoons to collect a range of creatures and transferred them to a viewing glass. With the viewing glass and invertebrate identification sheet we studied a range of body features including size, shells, legs, wings and tails – we located water boatmen, waternits, flatworms and shrimps. It was extremely messy and mud but a lot of fun!

To end the day we played a fun activity called ‘The Web of Life’ – we had fun running around experiencing what animals go through everyday to survive. The game works by assigning students as either herbivores (the prey) or predators (creatures and humans). Each herbivore starts the game with 5 life cards and as we set off running around and exploring our habitat we are chased by the predators who with each contact take a life card by tagging or being squirted by the humans I(teachers!). The main goal of the prey is to locate food and water tokens from buckets located throughout the environment. The winner of the game collected 10 tokens and retained life cards.

We would like to thank the Hills Christian Community School and Jeremy Gramp, Green Adelaide for organising and facilitating a fantastic day of engaging, hands on learning experiences of us and Neil Smith for supporting our day.

Written by

Ava S, Ishista S, Jack J, Khushi R, Lila S and Scarlett MC

YELP – Youth Environmental Leaders Program