SDN Owl’s House Kingsford at UNSW wins SPRout Sustainability Award

SDN Owl’s House Kingsford at UNSW has been named as a winner of the 2022 Early Childhood Australia SPRout Sustainability Award.

“All changes start from small actions. We embed the principles of Education for Sustainability through the Reduce, Reuse and Recycle initiative,” Director Bethany Yu said. 

Examples of practice which supported the win include: 

• Owl’s Market, where children and families are encouraged to collect and sell used clothes/toys/books at a reasonable price so they can be reused.

• Children developed Owl’s Library and designed a library tag system as maintenance to help reduce families’ expenditure in book purchasing and to build a bridge between home and the service through an early literacy experience.

• The Recycle Art Corner is designed to collect recycled materials for creative art making. Plastic bottles and containers are collected by all stakeholders to be reused in dramatic play to build on the children’s emerging knowledge of sustainable practices.

• The service reviewed the existing outdoor/indoor environments and identified the need to add more natural elements. Children developed vegetable gardens, collect fruit and vegetable scraps for the worm farm, consider the  importance of saving water and use the water from the service rainwater tank for watering plants and outdoor water play.

The service has also developed partnerships with external communities to promote Education for Sustainability, including being a Community Collection Hub registered with TerraCycle. 

Learn more about the SPRout Sustainability Award or SDN Owl’s House Kingsford at UNSW using the links provided.