SEARCH
Contact

Environmental education greening for the future

The City is empowering local schools to contribute to increasing tree canopy and greening the City.

Environmental education greening for the future
Sep 01 2021

The City is empowering local schools to contribute to increasing tree canopy and greening the City, by offering teachers a professional development opportunity with environmental not-for-profit organisation, MilleniumKids.

In collaboration with Millennium Kids and the Department of Biodiversity Conservation and Attractions, the City invited teachers to participate in a Green Lab Professional Learning Day on 1 September.
Teachers from six schools spent the day exploring natural areas throughout the City and participating in activities focused on protecting, increasing and monitoring bushland and urban canopy.

City of Bayswater Mayor Dan Bull said the learning day supported teachers in developing their own educational greening initiatives in schools.

"Schools have an opportunity to make a real difference to maintaining and increasing urban tree canopy as a number of significant trees are located on school grounds," he said.

"The aim of the learning day is to equip teachers with the knowledge and tools to replicate activities and implement sustainability projects in their own school which will help address the impacts of climate change at a local level.

"The sustainability projects will enable students to champion change in the local community. Students will be able to introduce knowledge and skills gained from the projects into their homes and the wider community.

"By embedding greening projects into the curriculum, schools can help the City address the metropolitan-wide decline in tree canopy and help combat the heat island effect.

MilleniumKids is a not-for-profit, environmental youth organisation that, through the Green Lab project encourages young people, to explore, identify and address environmental and sustainability issues in the community. It is a youth-led citizen science initiative to adopt, monitor and care for trees in urban landscapes.

"Throughout the day, teachers learnt how to map their own school patch and develop a conservation project for the area, organise incursions and pitch ideas to Principals and the City to get support to bring their projects to life," Mayor Bull said.

"In the afternoon, they participated in a future thinking design workshop to use their learnings to brainstorm projects they could implement in their school.

"The City provided funding for a relief day per school to enable up to two teachers from each school to attend the Learning Day."

Teachers from Camboon Primary School, Hampton Park Primary School, Maylands Peninsula Primary School, St Columba's School and Weld Square Primary School attended the professional development day.

Related information

    Go to Top of the page