North Goes Green

Archive for the ‘Green Food Tips’ Category

We are awaiting to hear who we will have as teachers here at the Gillies house! We can’t wait to receive our post-cards! Once we know and are done with our postcards- don’t forget to recycle them!

Gearing up for school can be daunting but for us we are pretty much all set. Lunchboxes – we are re-using the ones we had last year. Ours washed up nice and are ready for lunch! Stainless steel water bottles are being re-used as well. Backpacks- are going into their 1st, 2nd, and 4th year of use (incoming K, incoming 1st grader and incoming 3rd grader in the house).

School clothes are a mix of hand-me downs (thank you friends- and older brother) and a few new pieces so they feel excited about “new” school clothes. Pencils we have collected at various birthday parties are all sharpened up for homework and crayons are collected from what we have and everyone has their batch of colors.

Snack planning has commenced as well as what to pack for lunch for my picky youngest child. We have tupperware reusable sandwich containers which is great to save from using ziploc bags. Natural Wax paper bags are a great resource for sending in snacks and worrying a little less about the trash that results. I also send in reusable plastic silverware for the kids and may opt to send in cloth napkins as well ( I just need to find little ones).

Be sure to recycle as much as you can for this coming school year. If you have multiple kids you can sometimes repurpose one child’s backpack for the other child is you jazz it up. Glitter glue, and a glue gun can make a huge transformation or invest in a high quality backpack in K that is NOT a toddler sized one and it will last until 5th grade. It may seem like a lot to invest $30 or more for a backpack now but far better than $15/year for one that will easily rip and be replaced year after year.

Please volunteer to help North Go Green and we look forward to meeting all the new families at Back to School Night on 9/27!!!

- Thank you,

Allie Gillies

President, North Elementary PTO and GREEN lady @ North

Check out some great GREEN TIPS from local RI channel ABC6 News:  Great Green Tips

Remember it is simply every-day things we can do to help make the earth Greener! Using a reusable bottle for water is a great start. A stainless steel thermos is a great alternative to using bottled water. Send them to school for your child’s lunch and snack and save lots of $GREEN$ as well as the earth. Encourage your child to bring home their plastic bottles if that is more convenient for you. Recycling them at home is a great option as well. If we all do a few little things we can all make a HUGE change!

Please send any tips or ideas to: northgoesgreen@gmail.com

By now most of us know that we ought to reduce the amount of waste we put into our landfills but often in the rush of a busy morning we don’t really look at what we are putting in our child’s lunch box.  Today there are great re-usable lunch boxes that are insulated to keep our children’s lunches cool and tasty! Using one of these lunch bags is a great way to reduce waste entering the landfill. Another great way is to put water or juice or milk into a stainless steel bottle. This elminates plastic bottles and cartons from entering the landfills dramatically reducing waste.  If you send your child in with a sandwich why not use a re-usable mat that transforms from a sandwich bag to a place-mat and it can be used each and every day. Plastic water bottles and plastic bags are one of the largest contributors to our waste that ends up in landfills. Switching to re-usable containers can help dramatically reduce waste. Sending in re-usable silverware is also a great idea. Why not send in a really colorful utensil like those made by the Preserve company and have your child bring it home. Washing it and putting it back into the lunch box reduces yet another area of excess waste. Implementing simple things like this can make our school and our planet a Greener place!

Check out this link to make a waste-free kids lunch! Waste Free Lunch