Gardening + Upcycling Workshop At BMC Schools In Mumbai

The great success of the Green School Project has reached many citizens of Powai-Hiranandani who decided to volunteer with us. Due to this, the team for the gardening and upcycling workshop consisted of Sonali and Shruti. In particular, Sonali is a very talented woman living in Hiranandani that has experience in upcycling.

On Friday, 22 September, two workshops took place at Sangharsh Nagar Municipal School. The school is a huge institute situated in a degraded neighborhood, notably directed by the principal, Asawari Kilhatkar. Due to the vast number of students, we decided to divide the first group in the morning and the second in the afternoon.

For the first part, dedicated to the upcycling and waste management concepts, we stayed in one room of the school. During the first 20 minutes, we informed the kids about plastic pollution, waste management, gardening and composting. We asked the kids what they think about the environmental health and we were surprised to listen to their deep answers.

The first activity utilized skewers, 3 toilet paper rolls, and newspapers. We divided the students, around 40 kids of 9 years old, in small groups and distributed the supplies to them. Our aim was to simultaneously create a pencil stand for the class in the first group and in the second group, a dustbin.

The children then began to roll newspaper sheets around a skewer and cut it into many pieces. These will be used to cover the toilet paper rolls.

A bit of glue, a bit of patience, some color and the pen stand for their class was complete!

It simply takes a bit of everyone’s collaboration.

In the second part of the workshop, we continued with the project of the school garden made of plastic containers.

We cut the plastic bottles horizontally, vertically and as we liked it. The plants used were basil and some flowering ones.

– Reported by Yasmin