Visit to Kuppai Matters

Have you ever seen what happens to trash? It gets recycled or goes to the dump. But it also goes into the forests or the oceans and kills or harms the animals. You might think how it harms animals? I will give you a few examples - like a whale having plastic in its tummy, a cow contains plastic particles in its milk. One sad think is a turtle having a straw in its nose and it cried when the boaters tried to take it out. Last but eyeopening, a cow with 5 tons of plastic in its stomach. 

Now you know why I am here. I will tell you how to use waste. You have to give the proper recycling to things like water bottle without glue stickers. Things you can't recycle is chappati package because it has different materials like plastic and paint. 

For eggshells, fruit and vegetable peels, cut nails, leftover food, dead leaves, apple crusts, you can compost to make soil and you can plant a plant!

More ways are there like making your own paper, which you will do after. Using less plastic, thinking before you buy a package item, if you can recycle it or not.


One more thing is having 4 trash bins - one green, one blue, one red and one yellow. The green is for composting, blue is for things which you don;t know which bin it goes, yellow is for recycling. and red is for hazard thing like cat poop and dog poop. 

Now you know what to do with trash. 

You might have in mind how to compost? That I will tell you now.  First collect peels, eggshells, nails, apple crusts and left over food. Next take compost and add it to the peels and all that. Or add more, rotten bread, curd, milk, if you don't have compost. Finally keep on adding composting things and leave it for 40-45 days. 

By Mansoor Ahmed, Grade 5

Ecology Class - Year 2 : Visit to the Organic Farmers'` Market

What exactly does it mean to have organic products? A simple definition would be….anything in its true state where it hasn’t been tainted with harmful things like pesticides.

Being honest, using pesticides and artificial fertilizers do help, but here are quite a few disadvantages that will harm the product and will harm us in the long run.  Organic can also mean “pure” which doesn’t only apply to how produce is grown, it can also apply to the method in which it’s acquired or stock prices etc.

Basically, the more transparent your business is, the better. So, here’s the process in which food travels to markets and such (using fruit as an example).

Seems okay right? Well, actually, once you’ve studied the process properly, it’ll seem different.

When farmers give their produce to the middleman, the middleman gets to decide the price based on the season, demand, sales etc. And not based on the farmer’s own input cost, effort and time. Also, with this, there is more demand for produce when it is not the season. So, farmers would work hard to grow the produce and when its time to hand it to the middleman, only to get rejected.

Did you know that over 700 varieties of cotton in India have been replaced by American cotton, which also brought in the use of toxic dyes? Wow, how depressing. 

So, basically the motive of this whole talk was to make us think – do I know where all my food, clothes or really anything is coming from?

- Ishaal Abdul Azeez, Grade 7

Workshop on Teaching Creative Writing

Al Qamar Academy conducted a workshop on November 16, 2019 on creative writing and I was looking forward to attending it. 

The facilitator Aneesa Jamal was very warm and welcoming, listened and acknowledged contributions from the participants and efficiently guided the discussions and was flexible, working well with emerging ideas.  It was great to learn the techniques on creative writing, the content being highly informative and the facilitator was well informed about the workshop subject. 

The workshop was led capably challenging the participants to think and get out of their comfort zone in a safe environment which helped us discover new ideas and getting new insights on the things we already knew.  The workshop also provided opportunities to interact and learn from others.

The workshop was engaging and interesting with useful exercises and the group size was appropriate for the purpose of the exercises.  The entire training was well structured with the exercises building on previous learning from the activities providing us opportunities to reflect and consolidate what we learned.  The session was well paced without any boring lags.

I appreciate the insight provided which is easily and immediately applicable.  I can't wait to teach my own students what I learned in just a few hours. 

It would have been better to have the workshop as a 2-day session providing more time for the different exercises, more discussions, debriefs, and asking good questions to facilitate more learning but on the overall it was a very knowledgeable workshop.

- Naqeeb Sultana, Teacher