Think Green

Our two-week project school project on ‘Growing our Futures’ has seen children across the school connect on a deeper level with nature. Our school has become a hive of activity with gardening, science experiments on germination and creative endeavours centred on the environment. We have grown our Braeburn values of respect, curiosity and motivation whilst exploring the theme.

On Friday, we were awash with different hues of green as children dressed to impress as green eco-warriors. In assembly, we recorded a BNIS music video to the song ‘Heaven is a Place on Earth with the words having been carefully re-written by Miss Mucharie. This will be merged with video clips from across the project and will be coming to a screen near you shortly!

As part of their Geography work on fighting urbanisation Year 7 and 8 have learnt about the tussle for land in Kenya. They explored our capital city of Nairobi, looking at the important role that Mervyn Cowie played in establishing Nairobi National Park and Wangari Maathai’s campaign to stop housing being developed in Karura Forest.

We then looked closer to home at Mount Kenya Forest, discovering its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997. We were delighted to visit the Mount Kenya Trust Headquarters for a fascinating talk on the work that the organisation does. The children posed a range of thoughtful questions from inquiring how the tree sapling survive with the lack of reliable rainfall to how rangers deal with poachers. We had a guided tour of their plant nursery where they grow over 60 types of indigenous tree saplings. The children were impressed with their identification of a few types of trees.

To conclude the trip we also visited an agroforestry project, to see the future of farming and how to balance profitability with environmental morality. We saw how multiple crops were grown under Croton trees and how they had been selected to grow in harmony.

Overall the whole school has gained greatly from the ‘growing our futures’ project and have been further inspired to be long-standing active custodians of our precious planet.