Keeping Brightside Green

The Green Team

The Green Team at Brightside NI School have a special job to help Mrs Bishop, Miss Buck and Mrs Beck to take care of the environment in and around school.  The Green Team meet every two weeks to discuss ideas, plans and do jobs around school! Please see the action plan below to find out our plans for this year or see our Eco-Board display in the hall for more information. 

Green Team 2025/26

Autumn 1 - This half term the y1 and y2 pupils applied to become part of the Green Team. Mrs Bishop was so impressed with all of the application forms, and they chose 2 pupils from each Key Stage 1 class (see picture below). The Green Team are very excited to get started and help improve our school grounds and environment. The children met with Mrs Bishop to discuss their roles around school, and share ideas for this academic year. During the first meeting, we discussed the importance of preventing food waste to link to learning about harvest time throughout school. Green Team also talked to their classes about light monitors and how this can help us save electricity in school.

Autumn 2 - This half term the Green Team met with Mrs Bishop to talk about how to save energy in school and at home. As a team, we decided that school should take part in 'cut your carbon' month throughout November, and we collected data from children to see how much energy we saved. We also worked with a special visitor from the 'growing over winter' project, who helped us to plant new plants in the school garden which should grow throughout the winter months, like broad beans, radishes and salad leaves. We are excited to watch them grow!

Spring 1 - This half term Green team discussed lots of ways we could raise awareness about taking care of the environment. We had a poster competition to create new information labels for our bins and recycling system in school and Green team ran an assembly to remind pupils about how to use the bins correctly. In school our RED bin is for FOOD WASTE ONLY and the GREEN bin is for MIXED RECYCLING. Green team also created a crisps competition and every class loved taking part and bringing in all their empty crisp and chocolate wrappers to recycle at school. We decided to run this contest to raise awareness that crisp packets are tricky to recycle, but can still be recycled at specialist facilities such as Terracycle or at supermarkets such as Aldi or Morrisons.

Spring 2 - This half term Green Team have continued to take care of all the plants around school and we have enjoyed seeing how much they have grown! Green Team have been working with Miss Frost and Mr Needham to help improve the school grounds so that children have better areas to play outside, which are also based on natural materials and recycled items. School now has a new mud kitchen on the field made with natural woods that the minibeasts will love! We also asked our families and community to donate materials and objects that we could recycle and use to play with. Now the children can play creatively with lots of dressing up, recycled toys, plastic pipes and boxes, chairs, blankets and carpets! 

Summer 1 - The whole school has been doing lots of learning about plants this half term and Green Team have had a clean up in the garden to remove weeds. We have also had some more special visitors from the Food Works project, who have kindly donated more plants to help keep our garden looking beautiful. Now we have planted calendula, lavender, cabbage, leeks and broccoli! Mrs Bishop has also had lots of help from the after school gardening club, who helpled to make the bug hotel fresher, collecting lots of twigs, wood, bark and dead leaves for bugs to make their homes in. We also celebrated Earth Day in school by having a Big School Lights Switch Off and did our learning in the dark!

 Summer 2 - This half term Green Team have been working so hard to keep our plants safe in the heatwaves, making sure we water them early and trying to keep them in shade where possible. Green Team also ran a Sunflower Competition for all the children to grow their own sunflowers at home. We had so many fantastic entires that it was hard to choose a winer! Well done to all the children who took part in the competition and thank you to Green Team for all your hard work this year!

Green Team 2024/25

Well done to last year's Green Team for achieving the Green Flag award with Merit for the academic year 2024-25, all your hard work earned us this fantastic award!

Over the 2024/2025 academic year, we continued to develop our projects such as the School Garden and the Outdoor Woodland Area.

We elected a Green Team! The Green team met with Miss Jones (Mrs Bishop) and Mrs Beck and helped her to take care of the school garden. They planted lots of seeds and bulbs and grew some delicious potatoes!

They have also been involved in a range of projects such as:

• Living Streets Travel Tracker 
• Green Week/Community Week
• World Culture Day
• International Week  
• Earth Day
• Monitors to help keep our school 'green' e.g. plant monitors, light monitors, bin monitors
• Changing the school recycling system
• Forest Schools field area clean up
• Gardening after school club 
• Big Battery Hunt
• The RSPB Big Birdwatch
• Walk to School Week 
• Volunteers from local businesses to help develop our School Garden and Forest School Area 

See our action plan for 2025-26 here