Welcome to RWA Eco Team Blog 2017!

This year we plan to tend to the eco garden and plant flowers and bushes once it cools down and becomes the season to plant. We plan to install an irrigation system designed by the primary students. We are going to add more bins around the school and ensure students put their rubbish into the correct bins. This will be enforced by our Eco Monitors. We are going to hold a poster competition for the school in order to encourage students to be more eco-friendly. We are also going to make an eco board to display in the atrium. Our school's Green Flag is also due to be renewed in the coming school year and this will be made a priority by our Eco Team.

Here are some "before" photos of the Eco garden as it currently is. We will be updating the blog on progress made to the garden throughout the year. We also met the primary school Eco team on our trip to the garden last week and look forward to working with them to create an even greener environment at RWA!

Secondary School Eco Team

Go green!

2017 Grade 3 Recycled Community

Every year the Grade 3's build a city from recycled materials. Cool!

World Environment Day

We celebrated World Environment Day 

with lessons about how students can conserve water and protect our world!! 

Thanks to the wonderful work of SURGE FOR WATER for all their great humanitarian, life-saving work around the world.


Today Grade 3 partook in the Surge Water Workshop to mark World Environmental Day. Surge brings life-sustaining water and sanitation solutions to those in need and raises awareness of the global water crisis. Our students learned about the difficulties facing those in developing countries when it comes to water and all pledged to do their utmost to ensure that we all use water responsibly. If you want to find out how you too can save water just ask Grade 3 students. We are happy to help!

Thanks to 

The Total Office 

& Dubai Electricity and Water Authority - DEWA 

for helping out and to all the volunteers for making the day possible!

RWA Winners from EEG!

Huge congratulations to all of our winners in the Environmental Drawing Competitions. Thanks also to our fantastic art teachers for helping to organize this in the primary school!

Thanks to the Emirates Environment Group (EEG) for sponsoring the event! 

Grade 5 Exhibition

Our Grade 5 Exhibition always has green themes! Every year as the culmination of their PYP experience, Grade 5 students explore a project in depth. 

The Exhibition is a buzz with cool activities!

The environment is a subject that so many students care about, and it shows in their projects! Here is just a sample of the many cool Environmental Projects.

Endangered Animals in the Rainforest

Water Pollution

Save Water!

2017 Recycled Fashion Show

Here are just some of the many amazing outfits from today's Recycled Fashion Show. So much creativity......it was simply AMAZING!

Wold Planting Day 2017

A great day today with RWA celebrating Planting Day. 

We have filled 8 large planting boxes, kindly donated by PARIS, with the more than 150 trees, flowers, bags of seeds and herbs bought in by our fantastic students.

We want this to not be the end, but just the start of something bigger!

Grade 4 EcoVentures camp

RWA Grade 4 camp was with the Environmental Education Group called ECO-VENTUES this year. They learned all about local habitats in the UAE!

Grade 8 & 9 Outdoor Education

Grade 8 and 9 students spent three days in Kalba on an outdoor educational adventure trip. It looks like they had a great time exploring and learning about the mountain habitats of the UAE!

KG Gardens

Every year our KG1 and KG2 classes make the most incredible gardens!

Just goes to show that you don't have to be BIG to make a BIG environmental difference!

RWA Wins Again!

Congratulations, RWA!  You are awesome! 

EVERYONE did their part! Keep it up.

Thank you to the CLEAN ENERGY BUSINESS COUNCIL for sponsoring a competition (link to our announcement) between schools to REDUCE YOUR CARBON FOOTPRINT during the months of April and May 2016!

Once again... RWA prevailed and won a very cool solar panel bank and battery system! Now we can be even greener! Here are some energy use statistics from our school and information on how we are working to have a small carbon footprint here at RWA!   LINK

Our facilities team does a great job reducing energy consumption... but here are some things YOU CAN DO!

• Keep the A/C at 24 degrees.
• Shut doors when the A/C is on.
• Use natural light when you can.
• Turn off the lights when they aren't needed.
• Turn off computers, projectors, and machines.

The CEBC has a great school support program, sponsoring many competitions and school enrichment programs. They are a great partner for RWA in our quest to become Greener and Greener and Greener!

Here is a video made by the eteam as part of the competition:

Action!

'Tis the season for gardening in Dubai. 

The temperatures are finally down and we may eventually get a day of rain. The E-Team is making great progress on the yearly re-planting of the annual plants in our Eco-garden (those are they type of plants that only grow for one year, and have to be planted over and over.) 

We have received some donations of seeds and plants, and PARIS (the parents association) is supporting us with a small donation of tools. Thanks to everyone!

The E-Team's vision

The E-Team's vision

Unfortunately a lot of you may not have heard about the E-team, but it has been a committee in raffles world academy for years now. however it is relatively new compared to the other committees. despite all that we are always growing and innovating ourselves trying to come up with better things to make the school and our surrounding environment a better place. although we usually dismiss it and don't think much of our actions, we can make a huge difference by doing little things. I know it sounds cliche but our little actions can have a huge impact on the environment. One piece of paper being wasted, one water bottle being thrown away on the floor, all these little things can go a long way. Here in the E-team it is our duty to raise awareness and make a difference, and we can only do that with your help.

The Present:

Right now there is an eco garden going on in school, in which we will be growing our own garden to help give back to nature. Also the E-team holds assemblies and is constantly trying to get back our green flag.

The Past:
In the past the E-team did a lot as we had our KG1 gardening program, in which we had the kindergarten students make a garden to teach them the importance of nature and to raise awareness. In the E-team we also have the eco month in which we have the fashion show, the bottle collecting and the bottle recycling. this just a month of continuous care for the environment and raising awareness. It is filled with fun activities and assemblies to help raise awareness and make a change. We also had the PYP grade 5 exhibition in which we aimed to raise awareness within the next grades to ensure that raffles continues going on that path of conservation and raising awareness.

The future:
The E-team has a very similar calendar this year in which we will provide the school with activities and assemblies to raise awareness. our aim is to get our green flag back and make raffles a better place.

GARDEN DRIVE!

This month, October 2016, we are having a GARDEN DRIVE to renew and re-invigorate our Eco-Garden. It is a big part of maintaining our GREEN FLAG status.

Our campus and gardens are well maintained and all of the annual plants are thriving well, even over the summer. But now is the time to plant our perennial garden plants - veggies, herbs, flowers and such things (that die each year and have to be replanted). 

We will be collecting donations of seeds, plants, and tools to help us do so! 
If you'd like to support us - please bring your donations to Ms. Manahil's (Grade 3E) room G118, on the ground floor in the primary school atrium. You can also email her at ManahilG@rwadubai.com

Welcome Back!

After a few breaks and long weekends, we are back in the thick of it for the 2016-2017 school year!

We are happy to announce that we have successfully renewed our GREEN FLAG status! Thank you to all the hard work of RWA students, teachers, and administration. We have an ambitious Action Plan (linked) which you are welcome to explore to see what's coming up this year. 

See you next year!

As the 2015-2016 school year comes to a close, we are so proud of all we have accomplished. Here is a quick summary and a send of for the summer!

First, we are so happy to announce our renewed partnership with the GLOBAL ECO-SCHOOLS program. Thanks to our local partner in the UAE, the fabulous and knowledgeable Mr. Moaz at ECAT (Environmental Center for Arab Towns), we have been able to energize our students to accomplish even more!

Second, we would like to highlight our goals for next year (also found in our Green Flag Action Plan):

Continued Action Points:

- keep up with the Eco garden

- keep up the Eco dimension within the school (eco-monitors, promotion, competitions)

- keep up healthy food promotion in the cafeteria, especially meatless Mondays.

New Action Points:

- find partners to come in and organise practical & hands-on events to keep up the ECO awareness (Solar energy workshop & others).

- Reinforce the need for recycling through competitions & short videos to show during assemblies.

- Improve understanding of local bio-diversity.

- Finalize ban on Styrofoam at RWA.

HAVE A GREAT SUMMER! 

PYP Grade 5 Exhibition

One of our favorite things about the end of the year is our PYP Grade 5 Exhibition, which are the grade 5 research projects. There are always many ECO THEMED projects.

This year they had their own blog for the exhibition... Here is a link!

Curriculum Highlights

Here is an example of how our school learns about the importance of natural resources! 

Eco Garden Salad!

Although it is starting to get hot already, our Eco-Garden produced some fine vegetables!

Check out our teachers sampling our ECO-GARDEN goods!

YUM!

RWA Students Adopt Turtles !

Two of our KG students, twins Jad and Lily, adopted sea turtles with the 

Emirates Marine Environmental Group 

Please enjoy the Show and Tell presentation that Jad gave to his class: