Turnbull students and staff were very proud to achieve the "Green School" national designation through the Seeds Foundation in Calgary on Earth Day, 2007. The "Jade School" level was achieved in 2008. This year we anticipate reaching the "Emerald School" level.

Turnbull School is committed to addressing environmental issues, and we teach and model environmental and social responsibility within our school community. Some of the actions the school and students have taken to make a difference:

• No idling of cars and delivery trucks on our school site
• An Eco-Mobility Week to launch the school year, encouraging less energy consuming ways to come to school
• The school actively helps parents find car pools, as families come from all over the region.
• Recycling centres at each division of the school for paper, cans and glass
• Recycled paper used for all our paper towels and stationery
• Composting of all classroom and washroom hand paper towels through a local composting company
• Students and staff bring 'boomerang' lunches in reusable lunch bags and containers, avoiding juice cartons and excessive packaging in their food choices.
• Reusing binders and other school supplies from previous years
• At least one field trip a year on public transportation for Grades 4 to 8
• Reducing electricity consumption by removing electric hand dryers, using motion detectors in washrooms, turning off lights and computers when not in use
• Using compact fluorescent light bulbs
• Calculating carbon emissions in our homes and school and striving to reduce them.

In addition, many activities in the curriculum reinforce the need to care for the environment, such as creating food webs to show the interconnectedness of organisms and the impact of pesticides in the food web, or learning about the water cycle and the need to protect this precious necessity of life. Our primary students learn about ants, spiders, ladybugs and mice, and the role they play in helping our environment. They then turn this knowledge into a student written musical play, "Fly, March, Scurry, Crawl", to present to their parents and the junior students.

All environmental activities are integrated into the students' regular lessons, giving relevance and application to what they are learning in school, while being empowered to make a difference.

During the school-wide Science Fair in early March, special Environmental awards are presented along with the other categories. Each year the numbers of students doing an experiment or project under this "green" category has grown, as has our commitment to helping the planet.

Students and staff are doing a number of very creative environmental projects as they now strive for the Emerald School national designation.