St. Mary’s Elementary School learning to waste less energy!

St. Mary’s Elementary School is just starting their journey into all things green!

Engagement Officer Natalie McMaster visited the school to get them started on the right foot with energy. Three different age groups listened and chatted about energy and left ready to save energy in their classrooms, armed with Green Schools Light Clings, a Classroom Energy Checklist and an Energy Discovery Sheet for their classroom.

The Grade 5 math students spent an hour and a half with Natalie and completed the Energy Navigator Activity in the rest of the school. Conducting the energy survey was a great review of the outcomes they had just covered in math and got them thinking about what uses energy in their school. The keen group of students talked about what they found during their survey and made some plans on how they could change their energy usage and decrease energy waste.

The students also worked through a light bulb comparison chart to see how much it costs to use an incandescent, CFL and LED light bulb for a year. They chatted about the cost to change lightbulbs to LED and compared that to the energy savings for a whole year. Many of the students were keen to call Efficiency Nova Scotia and get their new LED bulbs and Power Strips in their homes!  They also used their new energy meter by comparing the actual energy use of the three different light bulbs to confirm what they had just discovered through using math earlier. The math class hopes to use their new energy meter to calculate phantom power for their school’s computers and figure out how much energy and money could be saved it they powered them down at night and on weekends.

They ended their session looking at a map of Nova Scotia and how renewable energy sources like windmills, dams and tidal have been added over time, and chatted about what the future may look like for energy use and production in Nova Scotia.

FInally, today they celebrated National Sweater Day, wearing sweaters to stay warm instead of turning up the heat – another great way to waste less energy. Lots of awesome energy initiatives happening at St. Mary’s Elementary!