A ‘Lockdown Rainforest Project devised by children at Sherborne’s Leweston Prep School has seen them named regional champions in the Better Energy School Awards.


Year 4 children spent half a term learning from home about rainforests during the winter lockdown of 2021. They started by finding out about the location of rainforests around the world, their climate, and the plants, animals and people that live in them.
They went on to create an ‘amazing’ collection
of writing, drawings and paintings, all of which were inspired by their learning about the rainforests, said the school.

Children also wrote and performed their own TV news reports on either a species under threat or the discovery of a new rainforest species.
The Better Energy School Awards is a nationwide competition for five to 11 year olds, run by the Young People’s Trust for the Environment (YPTE) in partnership with TotalEnergies.

The competition, which aims to generate interest in the environment and raise awareness of the need for sustainable energy sources, has received entries from almost 400,000 children since it began in 2007. Leweston’s project not only took top spot in the 2021 awards’ ‘Totally Clued Up’ category, but was also declared the best project in all categories from schools in Wales and western England.

The school received its trophy at a virtual Awards Ceremony and were given a cheque for £1,000 to put towards school funds.

YPTE director Peter Littlewood, said: “The 2020- 21 academic year has been an exceptionally challenging one for schools, with multiple lockdowns and all kinds of restrictions on class mixing to deal with. Despite this, environmental education has clearly remained extremely important to many schools and young people’s enthusiasm for learning about the natural world has remained undiminished.”

A spokesman for the school said: “The children learnt a huge amount from this project. They are all now extremely passionate about the importance of saving the rainforests.”

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