St andrews 71

St. Andrews International School Bangkok is a British International School located on Sukhumvit soi 71. The school opened its doors in 1997 to provide a British-style education in English to children living in Bangkok.

The STA Eco Beasts have been Busy!!!

EcoBeasts Action Plan 1: Set up Community Garden

At the start of last term we started to make a community garden. We found a space on the roof of one of our buildings. It was way too big a job for just us so we asked our parent community to help. We are so lucky as one of our parents owns an organic farm and was able to donate lots of really high quality organic soil.

**The Estates team helped us bring it up to the roof.**

**Then another parent joined our club and showed us how to make vermicompost. This is when you make organic compost using a mixture of cow poop and worm poop. It smells great!**

Worm poop is really good for plants as it keeps the soil heathy and moist. It also helps to fight any diseases the soil may get. Can you spot the worms? These ones are babies but they get big really fast

**Parents, teachers and children worked together to organise and set up the garden.**

**Our parent community very generously donated lots of different plants.**

**Everyone worked together to plant many seeds.**

**Another parent, who happened to be an engineer, helped us to fix the broken pump on the hydroponics unit.**

**Eventually we had lots of different vegetables and plants. Can you spot the thai basil? What about the aloe vera? We bet you can see the chili plants!**

We recycle bottles in order to plant seeds in and then we make sure they get enough water and compost.

We replant the seedlings into bigger pots once they get too big for the smaller pots. Can you see that big long green plant in the background? That is pumpkin!

**We even made some scarecrows to protect our plants from being eaten by the birds!**

Our next project is to grow our micro greens every week and sell them. We grow organic wheat grass and sunflower sprouts.

Eco Beast Monster Design Competition

In STA we took the Eco Beast design Competition very seriously indeed! We had plenty of entries from Year 1 to Year 6. Below is a selection of some of the most beastly!

Year 2
Year 1
A year 5 boy even made his EcoBeast entry into a very cool T-shirt!
This Year 5 won our special organic pok choi for getting her entry in early.

Drum roll for the winners… Congratulations Year 6F!

Making High Quality Eco Bricks!

EcoBeasts Action Plan 2: Making Eco-Bricks

What is an Eco Brick and why should we make them? Here is one of our Eco-Beasts to answer these questions and explain how to make one!

So to recap, eco bricks are a great way to reduce our single use plastic trash. Just one brick can take an enormous amount of plastic, which means that it takes up less space, which is always a good thing. However, if you make it properly then it can also be a really effective building tool. However there are 3 rules to make a really strong eco-brick.

1. Make sure the plastic is clean and dry.

2. Cut the plastic into small pieces.

3. Every time you add plastic use a stick to make sure it is stuffed down as much as possible.

The Eco Beasts have inspired eco brick stations all over STA from Year 1 -3!

We are planning to use the bricks to make our own raised flower bed. We will post pictures of our progress as we go. An extra bricks we are going to donate to the Bamboo School who collect them to build in their school in Kanchanaburi.

Eco Beasts official song Love Song for the Earth

We love it so we made our own version of the video!
Enjoy!

Some of our Year 6 girls loved the song so much that they did a dance to it for busking week. What a talented bunch they are !

We have been busy working on our school ‘Action Plan’ to help us move forward as a more sustainable school.

Check it out, maybe you can use some of the ideas for your school.