Croydon Park School, Sydney Australia

Our school, Croydon Park Public School is located in an inner west suburb of Sydney,Australia. We are surrounded by houses and a busy road which passes by the front of our school. We have some very old trees such as the Port Jackson Fig which is over 100 years old  and stands proudly in the middle of our playground and a Peppercorn Tree which is over sixty years old. In the last few years we have planted many trees and shrubs to make our school more beautiful. Last week a man who was here to lay internet cables commented on how our school grounds had improved since the last time he visited about 5 years ago. He said that our grounds were like an oasis and you would not really know there was a busy road so close by. In our Squares we found different kinds of mini-beasts including flying insects such as flies, dragonflies, a monarch butterfly and bees. We also found crawling insects such as worms, slugs, millipedes, slaters, fire ants, a hawkmoth caterpillar, white curl grubs and other crawling mini-beasts like little garden lizards, a St Andrew’s Cross spider and we found some birds including a white dove and pigeons. We know that at night there are flying foxes in the fig trees and many beautiful native birds like rosellas and cockatoos in the early mornings at late afternoons.

We have planted many native trees and grasses such as lillypilly, paperbark, thyme honey myrtle, lemon scented tea-tree, lomandra and callistemon. We also have a variety of non-native tress including daisies, strelitzia, agapanthus, tibouchina and a very unusual plant called amaranthus with very long (over 1 metre) droopy clusters of maroon flowers. Our non-living objects included a birdbath, mulch, litter and a broken spider web.

We chose 4 schools in different parts of the eastern, southern and western USA  to compare with our Squares of Life. Two of the schools face the Atlantic Ocean while we face the Pacific Ocean. We like the difference that they are all approaching summer and we are getting closer to winter – although our days are still quite hot for this time of year, the nights are getting colder.

We chose Duette Elementary School in Florida because they are proud of being the last one-room school in Florida and we also value our school’s 118 years of history. Duette had very different animals such as squirrels, woodpeckers, buzzards and a coyote. None of these animals are found wild in Australia as they are in the USA. We do not have any medium sized wild animals in our school because we are a city school unlike Duette which is in a country setting. Some of their mini beasts were the same as ours but the sulphur butterfly and anole lizard were different. 

We also chose Brookdale Avenue School in New Jersey because of the climate which is so different to ours and the many different trees which grow there. We also have trees with winged fruit which carry the seeds (which we learnt is called samara) in Australia but there aren’t any in our  school.

We know the trees found in Brookdale such as maples, birch and oak grow best in cold climates. We wondered if the ten foot oak tree is a Red Oak which we learnt is New Jersey’s State tree. We found similar mini beasts and non-living objects to Brookdale School.

The third school we chose was Rock Creek Elementary School, Maryland. While the mini beasts found were mostly similar to ours, one of the names was different - we call sowbugs -  slaters. Their plants such as American holly bush, red maple, white wood asters and poison ivy were very different. The climate in Maryland is much colder than in Sydney, so those trees grow better there. Some of the non-living objects were the same. For example we have a birdbath and a similar rock garden using sandstone rocks. We were interested to find that Rock Creek has a nature trail and wondered how long it is. We were also interested in their bat houses as we have flying foxes/fruit bats which visit our fig trees.

The fourth school we chose was EC Nash Elementary in Tucson, Arizona. We chose this school because it is in a very hot desert area and their climate is very different to the other schools we chose and a bit more like ours. Their plants grow best in a hot and dry environment. They found prickly pear in their school grounds. Prickly  pear in Australia is controlled because it takes over natural areas. We have never heard of a mesquite tree. We do not have scorpions in Sydney but you can find them in the outback of Australia where it is hot and dry like in Arizona. We had similar non-living objects although we didn’t find any glass or eggshells!

It seems that mini beasts in both Australia and the USA are similar although we sometimes call them by different names.

We decided the non-living objects are similar because they are often put there by humans or were once alive and had died. The biggest difference between our school and the 4 schools we chose in the USA is in the kinds of plants grown.  Most of our plants in our school are native to Australia while many of the plants in 3 of the USA schools are native to North America or Europe and grow well in cold climates. The plants we have growing which are not native were planted for their colour or unusual shape. Duette Elementary School had some wild animals because they are a country school and those animals can live in their natural habitat.

We enjoyed taking part in this project and want to say thank you to all the schools for sharing their squares of life with us.