The Barclay School

We went to Bowes Lyon House for a day introducing us to the Stevenage Youth Council (but it was more fun and food than debates and lectures). We went in and had refreshments and talked to other schools like Nobel and Thomas Alleynes. A welcoming presentation told us what out day was about and what sort of things we would do (there were also free bags with really cool stuff in!).

We had activities in the day that were all based on us as the ‘Conservation Generation’ associated with terms such as:

• Hidden water
• Footprint friends
• Sustainability

We were put into four groups; each group spent about 40 minutes doing a variety of activities, which in some cases had barely enough time to complete and others that could have gone quicker.

My first activity was hidden water, which was separated in two parts. The first part was about food miles. We had to position the food on a map where we thought it came from, and then we guessed how far it had travelled to get to the shops in their packaging. Some of the distances were enormous! We think some peppers were grown in the UK but went around the world to get packaged and back and so travelled about 6000miles!

The second part of hidden water (was actually about hidden water!) was guessing how much water was hidden in certain objects (household or food). For instance the production of 1kg of beef uses on average 15,000 litres of water! And 1 cotton shirt uses 2,500 litres!

We then went to my favourite activity, which was footprint friends. We went in all confused about why there was a sheet of tarpaulin sellotaped to the floor. There was a representative from an organisation called footprint friends, who told teenagers about their CO2 footprints, but this was not the fun part.

We then all sat on the tarpaulin armed with paint and brushes and painted our feet! I found it really fun! There are more ‘Works of foot art’ on the Stevenge Gallery, Footprint Friends website.

We then went for lunch, which was delicious! But that wasn’t supposed to be the main focus point. There were several organisations with stalls set up around the edges and another room; this was to entice us to join them or visit them.

Connexions had a quiz set up asking questions which could be found around the room for a prize. We all had a good look round before going to our next activity, which was Sustainability. The lecturer talked about what we could do to stop climate change such use greener energy, and then we placed sticky notes on a board to say how we could do this etc.

Next we had our fourth and final activity. We all made boxes or bags (or both) with our personal pledges in to help the environment. They could be something as little as ‘Walk more’ or something like ‘Convince my entire school not to waste paper’. We then hung them on the Christmas tree for all to see. I found this great fun and enjoyable (probably like most other people).

We all then returned to the hall for the results of an election we held earlier in the day for chairperson. After we returned to school about 3:15. I really enjoyed it! I thought it was very informative but mostly fun!

By Holly Kerslake 9WTH