Swans International School, Spain |

Vertical Garden

We are delighted to share a blog written by Calum David Naylor, a student at Swans International School who is part of a team delivering a Global Goals project for the 2018-19 Global Goals Competition.

Their project is among over 620 social action projects currently running as part of the GSL movement and we are excited to be supporting them to design and lead positive social change in their community. 

We are doing something which will benefit others and will help our local environment whilst aiding our skills and memories.

Project Summary

Within our school we identified a need to have a green area which would offer support for the local bee population, would get students involved in a micro ecosystem, would provide an area for potential IB IA’s of sixth form students and would in a small way make the local environment a cleaner, greener place. As we have a very limited amount of outdoor space around the school it was clear we needed to move away from a standard garden which led us to the idea of creating a vertical garden which we have decided to make out of old plastic bottles and/or waste wood. Importantly we are also planning on using native plants which have the largest benefits to bees possible.

My Journey

So far our progress on our project has remained largely theoretical. We have spent most of our time so far coming up with our plan of what to build, where to build it and what to build it from. From there we have also started to split up into individual tasks to cover what needs to be completed. We have also started to source and collect the materials we will need to construct our project and have enlisted the help of 3 teachers with strong DT backgrounds to help us and guide us towards building a solid base of which our garden can grow from and be developed from in the future. We have also set a date for construction and will work as a team assemble plans. So far it has been a good experience working with the younger year groups to come up with ideas and i feel we have all improved our teamwork and awareness of what the environment could benefit from and maybe even how we could possibly implement such ideas into our own homes and gardens.

The Next Chapter

I would say it has been a good experience so far being involved in such a project and its a good feeling knowing that you are going to be improving our school and the local ecosystem. It’s all a good experience working with others in the school because normally it would not be the case that our projects would overlap. I would recommend getting involved in similar projects to people my age and younger as it is something memorable and interesting which moves away from the typical things we learn in school whilst still holding a lot of educational value.

The 2018-19 GSL Global Goals Competition is now open and runs until June 2019. If you belong to one of the 700+ teams of students currently delivering a social action project as part of the competition we would love to hear from you and feature your blog and project photos on our website to inspire others.