As part of our whole school project on Climate Change, Year 5 decided to look at plastic and how it is polluting ‘Blue spaces’ around the world.

We got in touch with an activist group called Surfers Against Sewage and joined their Million Mile campaign to clean up our beaches around the UK.

First of all, we joined in an interactive assembly and learnt about how ‘Blue spaces’ are being affected by plastic.

We learnt where plastic comes from and how it gets into the waters and how this impacts not only the wildlife but ourselves also.

Next, we were introduced to an artist called Kurt Jackson who represents nature’s voice through his artwork. He inspired us to paint on the beach and try to connect with the nature around us when we visited Folkestone beach for our litter pick the following day.

On the day of the litter pick, we were initially worried that we may not find that much litter as the beach seemed quite clean. However, once our eyes adjusted to looking carefully at the pebbles we were shocked with how much litter we found.

In just 45 minutes, we collected 29.13 kg of litter.

After the pick, we placed one piece of litter each onto Cyanotype paper to create our blue piece of artwork. We then spent some time painting on the beach and just sitting  quietly listening to the sound of the sea and nature around us. We thought about what the sea may say to us if it had a voice and called out phrases as if we were the sea and wrote onto the Cyanotype paper to create a poem.

The next day, we emptied all of the litter onto the school field and sorted in into different groups.  Although there were many types of rubbish, plastic was by far the biggest pile of litter. We then recorded all that we had learnt onto paper and created our own display in the corridor for you all to look at. You will be able to see some of the litter which we picked up on our display in the style of Kurt Jackson.

So, what happens next?

We have all written postcards home to encourage our families and friends to make a small pledge to try to reduce the use of single use plastic in our lives.

As a school, we have signed up to join in a scheme next year to become a more plastic friendly school and see how we can reduce the amount of plastic we use.

We have learnt that no matter how small we are, if we all do our bit we can make a difference to our world.

We as humans have created this problem, so we as humans can solve it if we choose to!