27th January 2023
Big Garden Birdwatch long weekend starts today. There’s still time to sign-up and take part. RSPB need your help- can you spend one hour between Friday 27 and Sunday 29 January counting the birds? If yes, you will be helping the RSPB to see how birds are faring. It’s free, fun and a great way to keep an eye on your local wildlife.
Why take part?
In the last 50 years, the UK has lost over 38million birds- that is a shocking figure and one that the RSPB are working hard to tackle, with your help. You can log your bird count online at: https://www.rspb.org.uk/get-involved/activities/birdwatch/ where you will also find lots of helpful tips and info to help our feathered friends. So grab a pen and find a comfortable perch and get counting!
11th December
Groundworks has begun in the garden and this nifty little digger has done a brilliant job of preparing the grounds for a new accessible path and children’s section. Check back later for some ‘after’ photos!
08 December 2022
We have put up Eco Tips Walls for everyone and anyone to pop up their ideas, tips or even pledges that can help to make greener choices in everyday life. We have loved reading all of the amazing suggestions from the community and have picked out some to share here:
Say No to fast Fashion Write to your local MP and supermarkets, tell them to fight the climate crisis!
Make your gift wrap eco friendly- use cloths, old newspapers etc Toilet tip- one flush saves the planet!
Save and freeze food scraps and use in a hearty stock for soup when possible do laundry and other tasks in off peak times.
Do you have your own ideas to add? Check out the suggestions at your local library and add your own idea, tip or pledge to the wall and let’s all take small steps together to tackle the climate crisis.
4th October 2022
For Giffnock Library’s children’s event about water pollution, we explored facts in Giffnock’s junior non-fiction books.
From here we made a big display wall naming different pollutants, alongside the things we could do to actively protect the environment.
Finally, we built a water filter together, taking it in turns to carefully layer charcoal, sand and pebbles into a cheese cloth. We poured in some dirty water and as it was cleansed by these natural materials we watched it come out of the filter clear!
14th Nov 2022
Thornliebank Primary 1 class and primary 7 helpers returned to the library as part of their ongoing Root Cause Project work.
This week, we discovered some facts about minibeasts and how clever and helpful insects are for the natural habitat. Minibeasts often get a bad reputation as pests ( think wasps) but are actually brilliant composters. Many will help to chew up dead leaves and trees and the nutrients are passed back into the soil. They also provide a food source for birds and other animals. Even the wasp plays an important role in pollinating. Inspired by the fact-finding mission, the children painted pebbles ready to go in the outside area for a bit of vibrant colour! We can’t wait to create bee hotels and rest-stops for our new minibeast friends in the springtime.
9th November 2022
It was all about birds today when primary 1 class and some of the primary 7 class visited Thornliebank library. The temperature has definitely dropped so we chatted about how we can help our little winged friends to get food over winter. The children were brilliant at identifying different birds including robins, blackbirds, chaffinches and blue tits and we learned about the foods to avoid giving birds such as turkey fat. Then it was time to make bird feeders or fat balls. The children had great fun filling old yoghurt pots with oats, grated cheese, seeds and topped off with melted suet. 40 pots are currently chilling in the fridge and we can’t wait to hang them outside in the library garden for the birds to enjoy over the winter months.
Top tips… you can freeze fat balls/ bird feeder balls in the freezer and take out when needed. If you have a pet dog, avoid using raisins/ sultanas etc as these are poisonous to dogs. Turkey fat doesn’t set the way other fats would and can stick to birds feathers making it hard for them to fly.
31st October 2022
Kirsty, one of the writers who came along to the creative writing sessions with Lesley has shared a piece with us. Taking inspiration from arrivals and departures from Giffnock train station and our sense of place.
Train
Arrival departure, small window of chance and chaos
The platform inhales
A promising portal, holding, sighing,
The possibility of chance
So cruel, and me
Always left behind
I watch as
They filter through the veins of the town, homing to the heart
The beating hub,
Chunks of concrete, the edges cut out of the landscape for their convenience
It gives hidden, lonely soles some purpose
I’m waiting for my train
I have somewhere to be
A haze of people
Someone, wait for me
Panic, melancholy, homesick
Carriages approach,
My winter saviour,
Warm, familiar,
Musty, smoky damp
Squealing arrival
Roaring departure
Always get on the train
Do not get left behind
28th October 2022
This morning, I donned my wellies and spent a lovely hour with colleagues from East Ren Council’s Environment team, Sam and Mark, helping them and other volunteers to plant the last of the remaining trees from the ‘Wee Woods’ project.
‘Wee Woods’ is a Cop26 legacy project organised by the Environment team and has seen over 11,000 trees planted across East Renfrewshire! Today’s planting session brings the total to an incredible 27 Wee Woods- how amazing! Each Wee Wood is about the size of a tennis court and has around 400 new trees ready to flourish for future generations to enjoy. A wee pause in the digging/ planting gave me a chance to speak to the team about The Root Cause Project and we are looking forward to seeing how we can continue to support our sustainable projects.
5th October 2022
Lesley Traynor, published and passionate writer and founder of ‘Women With Fierce Words’ has just finished delivering a wonderful block of creative writing sessions as part of the project. We invited Lesley to write a piece for the blog about the sessions. Enjoy!
Storytelling is a way of protecting our environment. We need to keep telling the stories connected with places. David Attenborough, COP26 November 2021
Time had been carved out of busy careers, motherhood, and numerous other commitments. Taking part in the Root Cause writing workshops was about realizing a desire to write. The first two weeks of our writing journey included reflective walks in the grounds of Eastwood House. Thoughts were written into small handmade folding notebooks. A few extended this by walking in their own communities, channelling sensory and emotional reactions into wonderful thoughtful writing that was shared with others. Writing of where they lived (who knew we had an Olympian living in the area), of places important in their life. We relived one writer’s arrival in the small Italian village her family have called home for generations.
We drew memory maps of places special to us, annotated them with names of people, highlighting areas of significance that would never exist on an OS map. Stories were shared using them.
Settled into Giffnock Library, we considered how to place characters into an emotional landscape in our writing and in our last session we considered our connection to place. We observed people arriving and departing in Giffnock Railway Station, connected that with emotional leavings and arrivals at our own front doors. Our writing journey concluded by reflecting on our own narrative, of people weaving stories about us, of giving us a sense of belonging.
Thornliebank Library welcomed each year group from Thornliebank Primary and ELCC over the month of May.
This has been a brilliant way to share what The Root Cause project is, why it’s important and excitingly kick-starting the planning our community Gardens features and functionality!
We recapped the wonderful Root Cause centred events held in our libraries so far (read more here) such as our Food scrap growth experiment, seed bombs craft, and our grass earth man craft. There was much interest in rerunning these events again and we have even more exciting things planned throughout the year, so please keep a look out on our social media pages:
We talked about Climate change and greenhouse gases, and received some insightful responses from all year groups. Thornliebank Primary had already been teaching about such issues –with the recent COP26 and Earth day pledges!
Once we completed our introductions we moved outside into the garden space – explained a little of the ideas our working group has come up with so far, talked about the local wildlife and how a green garden space may benefit them.
Once fully acquainted the children returned indoors and used a blueprint to plan what they’d like to see in the garden space.
Finally we regrouped as a whole to share our ideas on our flip chart – while we got some weird and wonderful responses – there were definitely ideas supported as a collective – with clever ways to upcycle or reuse materials – such as a tyre converted into a pond space, a homemade bug hotel, and in line with the design of our Root Cause logo – a recycled materials sculpture related to our project.
Thanks again to Thornliebank Primary and the ELCC for their amazing ideas when visiting – we can’t to see these ideas become a reality.