Cool Your School at Lakeside Academy
submitted by Angela Troli, Community Development Agent
Earlier this year, Lakeside Academy won the Cool Your School contest. (You can read about it in our article in the Pearson News here.) Sponsored by the Montreal Canadiens and the National Bank, the winning school receives a full landscaping and greening project including maintenance service for two years.
During the months of April and May, the GRAME organization (Groupe de recommandations et d’actions pour un meilleur environnement) delivered 3 workshops to our grade 8 and grade 9 classes in preparation for the big planting day that took place on June 6th. The goal of these workshops was to determine the vision the students had for the different greening spaces. They also created a mood-board with pictures of a variety of trees, shrubs and perennials in order to bring their vision to life. In the third workshop, they presented their preliminary plan and in sub-groups they discussed together, gave suggestions and made any necessary changes for the final plan.
On Tuesday, June 6th, Phase 1 of the project took place at Lakeside. National Bank and Montreal Canadiens executives including Debby Cordeiro and Jon Trzcienski started the day off with a short ceremony commemorating the project. We also had special guests who made the event even more memorable! Youppi made an appearance and entertained us all and we were very lucky to have Francis Bouillon as part of the celebration. After the ceremony, the students participated in the planting with members of GRAME and throughout the day the vision from their design workshops came to realization! There were over 70 students who helped out and they were offered snacks from IGA.
The rain held out and the day was a complete success!
Phase 2 will take place in August or early September. We will be getting an outdoor classroom.
