25^th January 2011

 

Today we met up as a group for the first time. After getting to know each other we took our group photo. Here it is…

 

 We are Rachel, Darcy, Jenny, Laurie, Lauren, Lucy and Chloe.  Caitlin and Zoe joined us after this picture was taken so they aren’t on here. We are all in year 7 at St. Anthony’s and are meeting up on Tuesday lunch times to do our Living Streets Step Up project with Clare and Miss Charlton.

We also looked at a map of the streets around our school. We marked on it with stickers the good and bad bits about the streets. This is our map.

As you can see by the green dots there are a lot of good things about our streets.  We have lollipop ladies who help us cross safely, especially on the corner of Tunstall Terrace where there is complicated junction and you can’t see round the corner. We also have a caretaker on the gates who tells us when it is safe to come in and out of school. A lot of us travel quite far to come to school and we have park lane bus station near the school which is good.

There quite a lot of bad things though. Lots of people don’t use the crossings properly which is dangerous and there is a lot of traffic outside the school when we arrive and leave. The roads and pavement outside the school are really narrow and it is a dead end so when people get picked up and dropped off there is a lot of traffic which is also dangerous.  On our walk from the bus station to the school we walk through roads and alleys which have a lot of litter, glass and graffiti.

 8^th February 2011          

Today we went out of school to do a treasure hunt. Clare gave us a list of things to take photos of. Rachel and Darcy took the photos, Chloe and Jenny wrote things down and everyone else kept a look out for things. We also took photos and talked about the good and bad things we marked on the map last week. We noticed that where we walk to school there aren’t any bins. Maybe that is one of the reasons why there is so much litter around.   

15^th February 2011

We met up to look at the photos we took last time and to decide what we want to do our campaign on and how we are going to do it.

 We split the photos into groups. These were

• Safety
• Litter and Graffiti
• Fun Stuff
• Information
• Other

 The groups which had the most photos in them were safety and litter and graffiti. After having a vote we decided we wanted to do our campaign on litter and graffiti. These are the ideas we had of what we could do for our campaign. The ones circled in yellow are the ones we decided to do.

 29^th February 2011 & 8^th March 2011

We decided to do a few things for our campaign. We made a poster to put up around school with the help of our graphics teacher who taught Rachel how to use Photoshop.

 We also decided to invite councillors, people from our school and people who can make decisions to our school for an event where we would do a presentation and show them round the streets we use on the way to school. Jenny and Zoe made the presentation.  Laurie wrote letters inviting the councillors to come to the event. Darcy talked on the phone with the press to invite them to come and take photos. Everyone did a great job of planning the event, organising the food and inviting the right people.

 29^th March 2011

 This was the day we had the event. First we showed the councillors and people from school round the streets where we found al the litter and graffiti. The press photographer took photos of us talking with the councillors. While we were out on our walk we saw two police on very big horses and talked to them for a while too. We did our presentation which went really well and had lunch.

We have really enjoyed doing this project and we will stay together as a group to do other campaigns.