Year 3 pupils and students from Taunton School International Middle School had an inspiring day to Carymoor Environmental Trust, which hosts a replica Celtic roundhouse on their working landfill site.
We spent half the day focusing on our ‘I Am Warrior’ topic whilst dressed in tunics and wearing woad face paint as the Celts would have done to scare off the Romans. Carymoor has a wonderful replica roundhouse made with wattle and daub, as it would have been in Celtic times. Pupils enjoyed being able to touch the reed roof, sit around the open fire and admire the Celtic art work on the walls.
Having ground wheat on quern stones, we rolled our dough and stuck it onto the ends of long sticks before cooking it ourselves on the fire and drizzling it in delicious Carymoor honey. Having also weaved our own plates from willow earlier in the day, we were able to eat off these too for a truly authentic Celtic experience. For the second half of our day, we kick-started our work on sustainability by a tour of the landfill site.
Each class was weighed on the weigh bridge which lorries pass through (3H and TSIMs weighing in at an impressive 1.04tonnes and 3R weighed 0.8 tonnes) before being shown the vast areas of land, 56 football pitches big, which has been filled up to 15 meters deep with waste since 2000.
We were shown examples of objects which have been left in landfill unnecessarily throughout the decades from typewriters, bicycles and old VHS and cassette tapes (these certainly received quizzical looks from the pupils!). Did you know, they think it takes 500 years for each nappy to degrade?
It certainly made us all think and it certainly had an impact when we were sorting the waste from our packed lunches into the various recycling boxes. We hope to have inspired some new eco-minded children for many years to come.
Watch a video of the day here.
Categories: International News Preparatory
