Wednesday 29 February 2012

Cress Heads in a potato


An imaginative take on an old favourite in the Nursery at St John's. They scooped out the top of potatoes, put in a layer of tissue paper and added the cress seeds.  One week later - Cress Heads!

Children painted the faces and stuck on googly eyes.Time for a hair cut soon.

Saturday 4 February 2012

Mr Goulden's apple and Mrs Pickering's potatoes


Armitage has tried composting before but we're trying again using the bays constructed by pupils. Mr Goulden's apple core was the first thing in the staff room compost caddy and we're now getting a steady flow of tea bags and fruit skins.The caddy itself is a container from the kitchen that would have gone to landfill had we not reused it.

Year 3 pupils are emptying the caddy once a week along with their own classroom caddy.

These caddies are great and are providing a good supply of "greens" (the moist fresh ingredients needed to make good compost) but just using fruit and tea will not give us a good balance so it's great that Mrs Pickering (Catering Manager) is adding left over veg, salad and egg shells. This week we even had a bag of potatoes that had gone past their use by date.

To balance the "greens" we need "browns", dry material to soak up some of the moisture and create air pockets to help the worms and micro organisms can do their stuff. That's easy, newspaper and cardboard are perfect and our bays are behind the school bins so every time we add some greens we try to put in the same amount of browns.