Organise a Foot painting session at your school - a teachers review

Are you a teacher looking thinking about organising a Foot painting Session to engage your pupils in climate change debate?

The following is a write up by a member of staff at the Portsmouth Girls School...

Footprint Friends at City of Portsmouth Girls’ School by Clare Rhodes

"A group of Year 10 pupils attended the ‘Women in Leadership’ conference held in at St Swithuns School in Winchester on 16th September 2009. One of the keynote speakers was Karen Ford, founder of Footprint Friends. The idea really caught our imagination and we decided that it was something we could get involved in at school. This group of pupils was tasked with leading the initiative within their year group. They designed posters and flyers to promote the idea in school and wrote a blog on the Footprint Friends website. Their job was to spread the word and organise a workable arrangement for actually painting the feet during school.

It worked really well. We allocated a morning when all year 10 pupils had a double lesson of Science and used an empty lab as the painting area. Footprint Friends were great and came laden with all the equipment we needed, we just had to provide the feet! The leadership group helped with getting all the feet painted and kept hot water and towels coming throughout the morning. They worked really hard, we had 200 girls come in groups of 25. It was great fun and there was a really nice calm atmosphere the whole time, it wasn’t hectic (as I had predicted). I think the key to the success of the venture was that it was led by the pupils, they were totally committed to making it work, were very firm with their peers about keeping to time and were on hand to answer any questions.

After every class had finished, the leadership group painted their own feet, the local newspaper came to take pictures and wrote about the campaign. We were in the Portsmouth Evening News on Monday 23rd November – Fame!

Overall it was a lot of fun with a serious message which was both topical and relevant to the girls. They will certainly be more aware of what is happening in Copenhagen in December and interested in the outcome."