VS Röhrenbach

Environmental and nature-conscious thinking has been the order of the day at our small school for many years. We see much of this as absolutely understandable and strive to consider further changes, plan projects and implement them in the class council.

Smart cooking – buying unpackaged ingredients from the garden. Autumn is harvest time. Every year at the start of the school year, we look forward to a bountiful harvest from our school garden. In spring, we lovingly plant our beds and pyramids with potatoes, pumpkins and beetroot, which we then turn into delicious dishes in our cooking lessons. We love being able to shop completely plastic-free in our garden. A few weeks ago, when nature began to turn green, we picked fresh herbs (nettles, yarrow, violets, daisies, wild garlic) to conjure up what the children called the best soup on earth. We also toasted slices of bread from a loaf that had become too dry to eat. Our apples are pressed into delicious juice, which we prefer to drink straight from the press, or we slice the fruit and dry it as a healthy winter snack.

Making our chestnut detergent last autumn was particularly hard work. It was a real challenge to remove the shells from the fruits. But this made the enthusiasm for the end result all the greater, especially as the parents at home improved the lovely scent with a drop of essential oil.

We have decided to collect elderflowers in the next cooking lesson and turn them into a thirst-quenching drink for the last few days of school, which are often very hot in our class. In cooking lessons, we show the children how delicious meals can be prepared from simple, regional and few ingredients, often leftovers. The recipes can be taken home in printed form to be recreated at home. When cooking scraps (apple peels, etc.) can be used as animal feed, the sheep, pigs or chickens at the children's homes are always happy. By the way, we love smoothies made from overripe fruit or cake pops made from dry cake scraps! ;-)))))

No more plastic in school bags! Avoiding plastic starts with the purchase of school supplies. Parents are encouraged to buy colourful paper protective covers or, if plastic ones are already available, to reuse them. Instead of plastic craft boxes, more and more children are using old cardboard shoe boxes, and we have also replaced plastic paint pots with screw-top jars for practical reasons. Our art teacher makes the paints we work with herself, which in turn saves a lot of waste. Each of our children naturally brings their refillable water bottle to school. When we took a closer look at the lunch boxes today, we noticed that materials such as corn starch and metal are definitely on the rise. What we have completely banned from our school since the start of this school year are plastic drinking straws. We no longer want to use them at all. At home, the children like to use metal or even glass straws. Placemats are treated with care and, where possible, used throughout the entire primary school years.

We want more! Together, we thought about how we can continue to contribute to environmental protection and waste prevention in the future. We want to replace our paper towels with washable towels, and when cooking, we want to be even more conscious about how we use food and specialise in cooking with leftovers. We even considered using toilet paper more sparingly, which would also reduce plastic packaging. Environmental protection is important to us! We want to take action for all of us and for a world worth living in! Birgit Reiter & her primary school children at VS Röhrenbach.