Youth Energy Network

BEAT held its annual Energy Week at Bethune during the last week of March. We educated students and staff about different important energy topics throughout the week. Each day of the week had a specific topic: Energy Conservation, Renewable Energy, Transportation, and Embedded Energy.

The Energy Conservation group showed students different ways they can use less energy. Students had an opportunity to play Energy Conservation Tic-Tac-Toe. Students also had a chance to explore the interactive felt-board house where they were given energy fact cards and had to place them in the correct room in the house. This enhanced the learning of conserving energy in the house. Students were also able to try out different household appliances with watt-metres to see what the phantom load was.

Renewable Energy group had a display board educating students and staff about renewable energy sources, such as solar panels, biogas, wind and hydroelectricity. TREC brought in two solar panels and a model wind turbine to demonstrate to the students how they work.  We also had solar powered toys as well as a renewable energy quiz that the students could do for a chance to win a power bar. Students had a lot of fun with the interactive activities.

The Transportation group had an interactive display board where people could come and see how much energy it would take for them to get to school.  It also showed them how much energy it took to get from the feeder schools to Bethune. Stickers were given to people who participated. There was also a TTC ticket giveaway for people so answered quiz questions correctly.

The final day was Embedded Energy, which was a new concept for most people. As embedded energy is such a large topic, our focus was on embedded energy in food. To help them understand more, we showed various videos to students. After watching the videos, students had to answer some questions about embedded energy and they were awarded with local foods. We had local apples and carrots and asked them what they thought about these foods compared to imported foods. A lot of them said the local foods tasted the same or even better then imported foods! We also made sweet potato chips out of local sweet potatoes.

Hello guys and gals! This is the All Saints Green Team, here to talk about our latest endeavour into the land of using less energy.

We made posters for Blackle, with only question marks on them.  It was effective because students were wondering what it was.  On the day of the energy campaign, we let them in the know with a poster and a terrific announcement.

Last Thursday, we had multiple presentations in our school’s cafeteria about Earth Hour and reducing energy consumption.  We also held our energy campaign throughout the lunches.

We know you have been waiting in anticipation for what we did for our energy campaign, so now we will reveal how it went.

We brought in everyday household appliances, such as hair dryers (new and old), hair straighteners (new and old), a clock radio and a lamp.  We used energy meters to measure how much energy each appliance was using, even when they were ‘turned off’.  Students were also surprised with our results with the “Energy Scramble”.

We asked the students to arrange a few household appliances in order of how much energy they used.  If the students arranged these appliances in the correct order, they would be able to enter the draw to win valuable prizes.

A multiple-choice quiz was made that tested the knowledge of the students in terms of energy conservation.  The students were told that a valuable prize would be won if you got all the answers correct.  Winners were picked today (congrats to those who won!) and we are now awaiting the prizes.

At first, we were a little disorganized because the table could not hold all the quizzes, the appliances and the energy scramble at once.  We fixed the problem of space quickly and encouraged the rest of the students to come up on the stage for their chance to win.

For next week, we are focusing on our water taste test. A poster was already made last week, so now we are ready to go!

Be a Green Teen!

All Saints Green Team

Today we had our annual Earth Hour along with the rest York Region schools! All our hallways and classrooms had period 4 with the lights off. It was way cool.  Staff and students were seen doing activities that did not require electricity for the entire duration of the period. It was great seeing this green initiative in our school. We had the amount of energy saved recorded into a graph, and the reduction in electricity was nearly 50%! It was a very successful event, and we hope all of you guys did as well. We also reminded our students about the global earth hour tomorrow starting at 8:30 p.m.