Greta Thunberg Scarecrow

Our Greta Scarecrow for High Lodge’s Scarecrow trail 2024

When High Lodge invited us to make a scarecrow for their trail we were very excited. We decided to make a Greta Thunberg scarecrow as she represents our school ethos of sustainability and youth advocacy.

Who is Greta?

Greta Thunberg is an environmental activist. She was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2003. When she was eight, she started learning about climate change. The more she learned, the more baffled she became as to why so little was being done about it.
In August 2018, Greta decided to take action. Instead of going to school, she made a large sign that read ‘SCHOOL STRIKE FOR CLIMATE’, and calmly sat down outside the Swedish parliament. Her aim? To make politicians take notice and act to stop global warming. Greta’s strike was picked up by the Swedish media, and the word started to spread. Soon enough, tens of thousands of students from around the world joined her #FridaysforFuture strikes – skipping school on Fridays to protest against climate change.

Find out more about Greta:

Who Is Greta Thunberg? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WORnPLZE5CA
What can you do? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5c1WR7bFLyA

Designing our scarecrow

Everyone in our school community was invited to draw or share their ideas for our scarecrow. The Pupil Arts Council considered everyone’s ideas and came up with a design.
They wanted to:

recreate Greta in her iconic yellow coat holding her placard
stuff our scarecrow with single use plastic
stand Greta on the planet Earth
cover the planet in discarded single use plastic to remind everyone that we should use less plastic
include the views of Drake pupils (not just Greta’s)

Building our scarecrow

Greta

We collected and used single use plastic that had been thrown away to stuff our scarecrow. When our scarecrow is finished with, we will take all of this plastic waste to Tesco to be recycled.

We made some plaits for her hair and dressed her in old clothes.

Our globe

Children from across the school helped papier mache our globe using old newspapers, class flipchart pages, and used paper bags from our school dinners.

Pupils from Thunberg class in our Autism SRB painted the globe.

As the Pupil Arts Council wanted to use single use plastic to decorate our globe, we collected green and blue discarded single use plastic.

We used the collected plastic to collage the land and the oceans.

Placards

All children in Year 5 and 6 had an opportunity to discuss their thoughts and concerns about climate change. Then, using plywood offcuts, they each created their own protest placards that expressed their views.