Toko School Bees: Bee Boxes

Toko School Bees: Bee Boxes: As well as our bee suits arriving this week Raul the Beekeeper dropped off some hive boxes for us to decorate and put together. Once we have...

Miss Clegg's Class: Butterfly Gardening

Miss Clegg's Class: Butterfly Gardening: Yesterday Room 2 went out and got started on our Butterfly Garden. We removed all of the rocks, trimmed the hedge and have now placed some c...

Toko School Bees: Bee Suits

Toko School Bees: Bee Suits: Our bee suits have arrived!!!  We have purchased 6 bee suits using our Fonterra Grass Roots Fund money. We also got 6 pairs of gloves and ...

Toko School Bees: Our hive arrives!

Toko School Bees: Our hive arrives!: This blog post was written on Thursday 28th September when the bees arrived.  Today has been a super exciting day for Room 4 as our beehiv...

Small Stream Cuisine

                     Small Stream Cuisine

We have been cooking for a few years now because we thought it would be pretty cool if every Friday we had two or three people go into our staff room and make some delicious tasting food. It has developed over the years and now we have got a cool person in the staff room helping us do our cooking called Andrew.

A few weeks ago we started a activity called 'Small Stream Cuisine'. We had some people cooking for us so that we could enjoy some lovely nice food. We used fruit and veges from our garden to bake something delicious.

  We had some people from our classroom set the tables with some table cloths we collected from our community. We also made our own place mats to go on the table and look wonderful. Some flowers were placed in glass vases and a table completely set with knives, forks, cups and plates. When everything is set up it looks stunning.

Eating in Small Stream Cuisine

tree house

                           Tree House

                            

A few weeks ago some of us started making tree houses out of the pieces of wood from the old pool fence. We also used pieces of wood that Mr George brought to school for us to use for the tree house. 

First we built a ladder to help us get into the tree house. Then we started building the tree house using big branches and putting them in the tree and nailing pieces of wood that we had sawed. Now we have a bridge made of the old pieces of wood from the pool fence. 

Raised Garden Beds

Raised Garden Beds

A few weeks ago we had a Working Bee and made a raised garden bed. We made them out of the old fence which we had replaced. Nathan and Wayne built one for us in the working bee. A few weeks later Nathan, Sheryl and a few other kids from our school helped out and made another raised garden bed. 

We made the raised garden beds because we always had to weed. We made them raised because with a raised garden bed you don't have to weed so much so there were less weeds to pull out. 

This will help heaps because then we can stop having to weed heaps and get other Waitoriki Whenua activities done.

   

History project

History Project

For the last couple of weeks we have been researching about Waitoriki School. We have found a lot of interesting things. It's really cool to learn how the children who used to come here worked. We got into groups and made presentations on Google slides and printed them out we then had them stapled on the wall in the library. 

The display are really pretty. Some students have painted a stream because Waitoriki in English means small stream.

The principal contacted our old principal and asked when we got our Bronze Award for Enviro Schools. We got a lot of information from her so now we know a lot more about our school history.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

                                                                                                                                                                                    

Bees wax wraps

Bee's Wax Wraps

This year on Lamb and Calf Day we needed to make some money for our Enviro Schools so we were thinking of what we could do to raise money.  Mrs Wilkinson thought that we could make some bee's wax wraps. There were a few people at school who had some bee's wax so we were lucky to get them so we didn't have to buy any. Ms Ryder kindly gave us some fabric so we didn't have to buy anything. 

We will be selling them for $5 on October 25. We  are hoping to get some profit off so we can put in our Enviro School account. 

Plastic Free July

Plastic Free July

For Plastic Free July we thought about ways we could stop using plastic at school. We decided to look at our lunches and for maths we took out our lunchboxes, tallied up how we packaged our food and made some graphs to show how much plastic we currently used. 

We realized we used a lot more plastic than we thought so we decided to use small containers instead of glad wrap and with the shop brought items we took them out of their packets.
 On  July 1 we took our lunch boxes out of our bags and looked at our packaging. Once we had seen our lunch boxes on the ground we worked out that there were still a few people using plastic in their lunch boxes but otherwise the majority of lunch boxes were really good.

We carried on tallying them up.
A few days later after we had completed our bar graphs and saw a huge difference in the columns because there was no plastic wrappers in our lunchboxes. It was really cool to see the changes that we had made.
We have since had a discussion about how we can make our own packaging like bees wax wraps.

Litter-less lunch boxes 'please help'

Kia ora fellow enviroschools

Our focus for this term in the 'Moana room' is 'litter-less lunch-boxes' and wondered if anybody has any good resources, activities or websites we could visit or things they have done for this. It is mainly working with our under 3 year olds but would appreciate any ideas, comments etc....
Ngā mihi
Lee ann

Plastic Free July

         Beeswax wraps                                                                  

 To encourage and support our whānau in the Moana room (infant and toddlers area) we (kaiako and tamariki) made beeswax wraps to hand out to our whānau. We made these for our whānau with the hope they would use as an alternative to glad wrap. First we had to grate the wax into pellets, then we melted the wax and added our cotton material. When we had fully coated our material we then hung our wraps to dry:)
Beau is enjoying the hands-on experience and he is being very careful when using the grater. Tino pai Beau!

We have done this process with different groups of tamariki throughout the week so everyone got to experience and participate in learning of ways to reduce our plastic use, however small that may be.

Learning about healthy soil

At Opunake kindy our enviro school focus this term is learning about Taepu Hauora (healthy soil). As kaitiaki of our whenua we are teaching and providing our tamariki with hands-on experiences that will support their learning and understanding of healthy soil.

 We are adding compost to our new vegetable garden to make our soil healthy by giving it the nutrients it needs to produce kai.

Then when our vegetables are planted we add worm juice to help our plants grow big and strong so we can eat them for afternoon tea or share with our whānau and community.

Enviro Learning @ Toko School: Lots of Curious Things Happening in Room 7 Today

Enviro Learning @ Toko School: Lots of Curious Things Happening in Room 7 Today: It has been a busy day today as Room 7 get underway with their Curious Minds Project.  Mrs Fergus was interviewed by Venture Taranaki.  Roo...

Enviro Learning @ Toko School: New produce - Feijoas and Pumpkins

Enviro Learning @ Toko School: New produce - Feijoas and Pumpkins: Room 2 have lots of yummy feijoas to sell - $2.00 per kg.  We also have lots of pumpkins - $4.00 each.

Enviro Learning @ Toko School: Hand Made Lavender Soaps

Enviro Learning @ Toko School: Hand Made Lavender Soaps: Room 7 have hand made lavender soaps for sale for Mothers Day.  These will be on sale in Room 7 on Friday.

Stratford P/S & Matapu School tamariki present their CAPOW findings

In March this year, Stratford & Matapu tamariki got together with amazing displays for their CAPOW presentation.  Councillors, media, community groups, parents & whanau all celebrated & learn so much more about organic waste & the efforts of these 2 schools.  Thanks to their Curious Minds funding. See more about it here

Enviro Learning @ Toko School: ACWW South Pacific Conference

Enviro Learning @ Toko School: ACWW South Pacific Conference: Today our Enviro Leaders hosted delegates from the Associated Country Women of the World South Pacific Area Conference. What a wonderful le...

Huiakama School wins Taranaki Regional Council Environment Award for 2016

The quiet achievers on the Forgotten Highway at Huiakama School are being very industrious in their enviro efforts.  In November 2016 they were awarded the much sort after Environment Award.  Check out their write up here and make sure to watch their cool video :-)  Well done team!