Eco Schools Awards

Last Thursday Finn, our Eco Committee Chairperson, and Mrs McKeown represented Holywood Primary School at a 30 Years of Eco Schools Celebration and Green Flag Awards at Stranmillis University. We are very proud to have our eight Green Flag. Well done to all involved!

Waste Free Wednesday Winners!

Well done to Room 5 and Room 19 who are joint winners of our Waste Free Wednesday Competition, the pupils of the winning classes received a packet of wildflower seeds each as their prize. Thank you to everyone from P1-7 for working hard to cut down their single use wrappers. Let’s keep working together to swap single use items for reusable containers.

Green Flag Success

We are thrilled to have confirmation that we have been successful in being awarded our eighth Eco-Schools Green Flag! The Eco-School’s team were very impressed with the hard work of the Eco Committee and wider school community. A big thank you to all the parents and relatives who have volunteered to help with gardening and the local community groups who have partnered with us including Men’s Shed, the Ulster Conservation Volunteers and Ards and North Down Council. Let’s keep working together for the environment.

New gardening equipment for HPS

Ards and North Down council parks department have kindly given HPS some new tools and gardening equipment as part of their Growing Club scheme. P4, Room 14 enjoyed meeting Ryan today, an expert gardener from the council. He came with the new equipment and helped us prepare the polytunnel for growing some fruit and vegetables this Spring. We look forward to working more with Ryan in the coming months.

Autumn Sweep

Last week we had our HPS Autumn Sweep, this involved a big tidy up of the school grounds in preparation for Winter. We want to thank the great team of parents and relatives who got involved! Our Eco club also pitched in with weeding and planting bulbs. We also want to thank Bill, Sam and the team from Holywood Men’s Shed who have built a picket fence to mark off the construction play area for the P1 and 2s and created a lovely log border for one of our wildflower areas. Sam was remincising that the last time he was at HPS was in the 1950s as a pupil! Lovely to have you back Sam! Here are some photos of everyone’s hard work.

2023/24 HPS Eco Committee

We are proud to present our recently elected Eco Committee for this academic year. The committee comprises a representative from each class from P4-7. The committee will work closely with Mrs McKeown promoting our Eco topics of Biodiversity, Healthy Living and Marine Life as we work towards the renewal of our Green Flag in June.

The committee:

Chair Person: Finn P7

Deputy Chair Person: Harry P7

Other committee members:

Miller P7, Jamie P6, Harrison P6, Ella P5, Ellen P5, Ellie P4, Jack P4 and Evie P4

We look forward to the great ideas and intiatives they will bring to our school this year.

Wildflower Sign Competition Winners

Well done to our Wildflower Sign Competition winners! The school council and the Eco committee were involved in judging the competition, they were very impressed by the time and effort the P4-7 pupils put in. It was a very high standard of entries! Each of our winners won a packet of wildflower seeds to take home and we are planning on displaying these signs in our wildflower areas.

First place: Emma P6 R9 

Second place: TJ P7 R11

Third place: Molly P6 R10

 Fourth Place: Susanna P5 R8

Well done everyone! We are very excited to see our wildflowers starting to grow in this lovely weather.

HPS Eco Committee 2022- 2023

Each class from P4-7 have elected their Eco Committee representative. The committee will work closely with Mrs McKeown towards our Eco Schools Green Flag award and will be involved in promoting enviromental initiatives in our school. Pupils who were interested in the role in each class had an opportunity to share why they felt they would be suitable for the post before the class voted. We are really pleased to have the following pupils onboard our committee for this academic year.

P7 - Evan (R12) and Emily (R11)

P6 - Natasha (R13), Ella (R10) and Marnie (R9)

P5 - Kate (R8) and Eden (R7)

P4 - Ella (R6), Lucy (R14) and Euan (R19)

NI Water provide free water bottles to every pupil in HPS!

Our Eco committee followed up their meeting with NI water in April by completing a survey from P1-7 to see how many pupils regularly use reuseable water bottles. They were really encouraged to find over 83%  of HPS pupils use reusable water bottles. This is really encouraging but our aim is to get it over 95%. NI water have provided a free reuseable water bottle for every pupil in the school. These are BPA free. The boys and girls were very excited to receive them and it’s been great to see them getting lots of use in the last week or so! Let’s work together to cut down single use plastics!

The Lyric Comes to HPS!

On Monday performers from the Lyric Theatre in Belfast came to Holywood Primary school to perform for the P5 year group. They performed A Walk is Not Just A Walk by Jess Williams and Michael Beigel. The play follows five friends on an adventure through their local park exploring themes of littering, plastic pollution and global warming! It was a helpful reminder of how our actions can have global implications which is part of Global Perspectives Eco Topic.

Spring is on its way!

 We have begun to see the first signs of Spring as our bulbs donated to us by ‘Hannah’s Courtyard’ last year have begun to resurface this year! We have spotted daffodils, crocuses and snow drops already! Eco club have been busy weeding and looking after these flower beds.  

Our Second Waste Audit

In February 2019 we conducted a school waste audit and found large proportions of food waste and recyclables in our classroom bins. As waste is our current major Eco school topic we have promoted taking food waste home and disposing of it in green bins and cutting down the use of our single use plastics through Waste Free Wednesdays. In the past year we have had also had assemblies raising awareness of the problems with landfill sites and disposing of plastic. P7 Room 10 have also bought and taken responsibility for washing out metal straws to replace our plastic ones. Here are photos of ECO club conducting our second audit of our classroom bins a few weeks ago. It was great to see an overall reduction in our waste, especially food waste. Our P6’S are currently compiling the results and we hope to share these with you soon. 

Waste Free Wednesdays

 At the start of January, we started Waste Free Wednesdays to work to reduce our use of single use materials and encourage each other to buy in bulk and use reusable containers. Thank you to all the parents and pupils who have been working hard to achieve this! Here are some pictures of our reusable containers in P4 room 16! Let’s try to keep this up!