At Hungerford Primary School, Year 4 children have been delving into an environmental project as part of their topic on Inventions. Lewis feels that “the topic was great fun as we got to design and make a recycling machine – it was good to learn about how we can help the planet and protect our environment.”

It all started when the children received a letter from Snowy the Chief Elder (a character from the play Y4 are currently rehearsing), asking for their support to help him with some environmental concerns at the primary school.

As part of this, the children designed and completed questionnaires to family and friends. They then created their own graphs for analysis in school. During this project, the children designed inventions to compost the KS1 fruit, created posters to encourage teachers and children to reduce the amount of paper used in school and designed and built a system to encourage recycling (of paper, card and plastic) in school.

“We used boxes to build a recycling box for school, the two small and one big box (for paper – as school uses a lot of this!) means that children can sort cardboard, plastic and paper. We want to recycle these materials!” stated Catherine. Scarlett commented that, “My poster is by the photocopier so teachers think about how much paper they could be wasting!”

Over this half term the Year 4 children will be practising and performing their play ‘A Big Green Adventure’. The play focuses on a group of forest animals’ decision about the human’s development in their forest home.

“I’m Chip, who follows Snowy, as they venture into the city to find out if they should allow the humans to expand into the city,” says Libbie. “It’s great fun and we love singing all the fun songs.” The children are really excited about dressing up and performing their play to the school and parents – a great way to give the children an insight into some of the environmental issues which we face today – the rehearsals are well under way.

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Louise Allen and Cerys Carter (Year 4 teachers)