Happy Earth Day Everyone!

Since today it's the Earth Day, we wanted to remind you of the importance of protecting the Earth - our HOME - from pollution of any form.  Either if the pollution is in the form of carbon dioxide or other harmful gases, noise, garbage and any other form it is OUR duty to reduce it!  Because, if we don't care about the Earth then who will?

Second Issue of our School Newspaper

With the second issue of the school newspaper we managed to give even more information about climatic changes and environmental issues!  Specifically, a reporter -who's in our team- talked about the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference and also about the importance of planting trees, as the impact of their reduction would be disastrous!
The newspaper of our school is a very good way to reach everyone in school as more than half of the students buy it and read it!

The website of our newspaper is: http://tritografima.99k.org/ (in greek)
This website will soon be hosting the first and second issues of the newspaper in pdf form.

Presentation of CO2nnect at the City Hall

Last Friday, participants from all the High Schools that are in the Municipality of Limassol gathered at the City Hall to present ideas of how to improve our city.  Our school chose to make a presentation about the problems caused by pollution in Limassol.  We integrated our actions in the CO2nnect campaign in the presentation to make it more interesting and we also showed the results from the online questionaries of co2nnect.org.  We hope that this way a lot more schools from Limassol will be willing to join the campaign and even if they don't join it, at least they might think of other ways to reduce pollution!

Workgroups at school for Global Environmental Problems!

Today we had the Innovation Day of this year and as suggested by the name of the day we had to do something innovative!  So... students became teachers!  About 25 students from the 1st and 2nd years from our school were divided  in four groups each of which had another student as a "coordinator".  The title of the workgroup was "Save the Planet" and it had to do with sustainable development and environmental problems.  Each group had to investigate one of these four topics: transportation, forests, garbage and energy.  For the investigation, a lot of material was provided by the coordinators such as abstracts from articles and scientific research, videos, songs, etc.  Then each group was given a big piece of paper (A1) and some markers and had to present causes, consequences and solutions for each topic.  After each group presented its work, there was a conversation where we discussed whether the proposed solutions would be effective and easy to apply and a lot of other issues.  Before the end, we showed our videos and made a brief introduction to CO2nnect and SUPPORT!  The results of the workgroup were amazing as the students participating had a very nice time and also learnt a lot of new stuff!  This has always been the aim of our campaign: to combine fun with learning as this is probably the best way to learn!

Trip to the Netherlands

Here is what a student wrote about her experiences in the Netherlands:

Between the 7th and the 11th of February of 2010 a group of 10 students from our school along with two teachers, Mrs. Maria Loizou (Physics Teacher) and Mrs. Maria Panagiotou (Greek/History Teacher), and Mr. Chomatas, representative of the City Council of Limassol, visited the Netherlands and specifically a place called Noord-Brabant to attend a conference held by a European Lifelong Education Program called "SUPPORT Partnership and Participation for a Sustainable Tomorrow" which was titled "Youngsters in the driver's seat for local sustainable development".  The aim of the conference was to sensitize youngsters about their extremely important role in society as well as their perspective and substantial participation in rebuilding our society with the installation of viable conditions that serve sustainable development as the main purpose.

When we got there, we got separated into mixed groups of students from all over Europe.  Each group had to study a case and suggest solutions about it.  Through this process we acquired a lot of knowledge and we were given the opportunity to meet and get to know peers, exchange views as well as learn more about their cultures, lifestyles, way of thinking, customs and traditions!

The Newspaper of our School

Members of our team are involved in the creation of the school newspaper and -as always- we are going to take advantage of that!  We have agreed with the teachers and the students who are responsible for the newspaper that one of the students of our team will write an article in each of the first editions of the newspaper about the environmental problems in general!

This way we hope that we will be able to access all of the students in our school and maybe after they read what we have to say they will think twice before using the car to go to a shop only 200 metres from their home!

Results of the International School Competition

This evening we were really excited to read the results of the CO2nnect International School Competition!  That was because the juries honoured our project report with the first prize!  We were elated to read their comments about our work, too!

Click here to read the results of the competition

Click here to read the comments of the juries about our project

We, hence, want to thank the Juries for giving the first prize to us and congratulate ALL the other schools for their terrific and remarkable activities and project reports!

We also want to reassure you that this prize, which is the recognition of all of our hard work, won't be the happy ending of our activities in our community.  On the contrary, it will be a trigger that will push us to be even more active and creative in order to sensitize everyone in our community, for a better planet!

We want to conclude with just one (promising) phrase: the best is yet to come!;)