On the TGV from Paris to Annecy the children worked in their teams to begin a carbon enquiry – the teams are Water, Food, Waste, Food and Packaging and Energy. These learning enquiries will run through the week as the children observe, record, raise questions, identify issues and debate and decide upon improvements both on this programme as well as what might make things better back home.
They also thought about their current understanding of the terms, Leadership, Team and Sustainability. What do these three words mean to the children and how can they apply them to their own lives?
The word clouds below illustrate the current collective understanding. Will will compare the same exercise at the end of the week.
Leadership
Team
Sustainability
We have just crossed the border into Switzerland and will soon be at the airport, so this might be the last expedition post.
It has been a wonderful learning and growing experience for all of us, and in particular there really have been examples of leadership and depth of insight which have left the leaders both moved and humbled.
We will soon be back at Gatwick, and from here on each member of the expedition starts their new journey with pledges and memories that will, I am sure, go with them for the rest of their lives.
After a good breakfast we made our final pledges, shared our departing thoughts then boarded the coach.But it wasn’t straight to Geneva, instead we stopped at the Chamonix water treatment works where all of the water used in the Chamonix valley is recycled.
It is a fascinating facility hidden beneath a green roof. In the shadow of the mighty mountains the four staff here oversee the cleansing 100,000 m3 of water daily, that’s 100 million litres or a billion (1000 million) 100ml glasses of drinking water! In energy terms they use 35,000 kw a week to run the plant making it the second biggest user of energy in the valley after the Companie de Mont Blanc which operates all the ski lifts, cable cars and the train up to the Mer de Glace.
All very interesting when yesterday we were watching vast water falls pouring pure mountain water into the valley.
The children loved the smell of the raw sewage . . . Not . . . and were able to see in the works laboratory just how the cleaning process works.
While it was clearly quite smelly inside the building, particularly at the beginning of the process! we all appreciated just how important it is to recycle waste and wondered what the environment might have been like without this place.
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