Episode: 9
Title: Coolbinia Primary School
Broadcast: 31st October 2015
Presenter: Nigel Ruck

This story follows Nigel to Coolbinia Primary School in Perth, a multi-award winning school including the prestigious environmental school award from the United Nations Association of Australia recognized their inspiring approach to gardening and environmental education.

• Debra Holland, Assistant Principal states that Coolbinia’s gardening program has two main aspects; the kitchen garden program and conservation of local flora – the bushland project.
• With the kitchen garden program, the children are involved in every step of the way like healthy soil preparation, planting, harvesting and cooking of the food as well as composting of food scrapes.
• The bush tucker garden provides hands on science experiments from looking at the biological processes to the lifecycle of insects and how they help with the garden.
• Coolbinia plants native species every year to ensure that they have a healthy biodiversity and ecosystem.
• The students plant native seedlings, collect litter and weed their bushland. However, at the start of this year a fire burnt half of their bushland so they made 4x4 quadrat around the bushland that they monitor every month.
• Each time they visit a quadrat we measure the regrowth of the flora and count how many new species grow.
• During the year, the students learn about the bushland from noongar educators and biologist from which they record their learnings in a published book entitled “Heart of Coolbinia: Our Bush Trail”.

Coolbinia Primary School – Contact: 08 9444 3798
Website: http://www.coolbiniaps.wa.edu.au