Community
15 March, 2024
Students catch the cleaning bug
STUDENTS at Lismore Primary School and Camperdown College’s junior campus sported brightly coloured gloves and tidied up their school grounds as part of Clean Up Australia Day.
While the official day is held on March 3, Lismore’s Landcare group holds a clean up event at the primary school annually on March 1 to teach students the importance of looking after the environment.
For Camperdown College, this was done on Friday, March 8.
Lismore Landcare facilitator Sarah McMaster said the day was about community engagement and teaching younger generations to be environmentally savvy.
“Landcare has a role of environmental initiative, and we want to include the kids to teach them about sustainability and environmental causes,” she said.
“Afterwards, we write down what we’ve found so it can go back to Clean Up Australia Day and we can see what sort of rubbish is still being left around and the kids become more aware of what’s around their school and ways they can reduce their plastic use.”
Students picked up rubbish around the school grounds at midday, showing off their collections to teachers as they went.
Camperdown College classes were each given a specific area of the school grounds to focus on, and environmental leaders Jonty Richardson, Duke Giles and Nathan Wilson said the bottom oval had the most rubbish.
“We hope to implement some new bin layouts at the junior campus to see if we can keep our yard clean and minimise the rubbish,” they said.
Lismore Primary School acting principal Tegan Aquilina said it was important for students to learn about the environment.
“Many of them come from farms, so the environment is very important to them,” she said.
“We want our students to be able to look forward to their future and care for our planet.
“We’ve been doing some work in literacy and numeracy and reading the Lorax with the kids to get them engaged.
“They’ve been looking at what they currently do, and each one is getting a goal of what they’re going to do moving forward, whether it’s turning the tap off when they brush their teeth or making sure they’re putting everything in the right bin for rubbish day.”
Ms Aquilina said the day provided students with a boost to look forward to the future.
Read More: Camperdown