As spring (Koanga) is warming up, tamariki at Puketapu Kindergarten have been potting up seeds for our vegetable gardens.  Tamariki enjoy talking about planting seeds.  We were challenged when the beans that we planted, disappeared over night!!  Maybe a mysterious family of slugs or snails?? We are developing an appreciation, respect, and love of the natural world!

Uruti School - Sharing our Journey

Uruti school is finally an Enviroschool, we are all very excited and we want to share some of the actions we have already taken. We have made some changes in our gardens and we want to share our Kiwi project.

Here are  some facts about our school. Our school is in North Taranaki and we have two teachers, 16 kids and two classrooms. We even have our own school motto, stand tall and discover. (By Isabella and Macy).

Back in march 2013 Uruti school started the Kiwi protection group, when they heard that 95% of Kiwi chicks die before they reach 5 months of age. We have been running  it since 2013 now it’s 2015. The kids enjoy protecting the Kiwi with the community. 

We now have over 100 stoat traps up Uruti road and on our farms. Each person has a responsibility to check the stoat traps every month and to help out. They also leave the kiwi data in the bucket, then when the children arrive at school they get the data out of the bucket and put it on the computer. We give  the person who helped to check the traps a thank you call. 

We have just won an award from the Taranaki Regional Council (By Ryan and Jarhlia)

The main predators are stoats, cats and dogs and many others predators.

We planted flax to stop debri falling into the river and causing banks to erode. Our river splits the farmland from the school’s property and we have been working  to help the environment with cleaning the air by planting some trees.  We get our trees from ‘paper for trees’ each school is asked to record their paper and cardboard recycling throughout the year and get a tree for an award that they can plant. (by  Katie)

In our extremely lovely garden we have a variety of vegetables. When it’s time to pick them we cook them into yummy food! We cook the food ourselves but the teachers are with us when we cook. Then when the food is ready to eat we give the school children the same amount of the food we cooked. Every child compliments the food we cook. 

We are planning to plant an orchard, we have got some fruit trees, here are some fruit trees in the orchard; passion fruit, grapes, lemons and mandarins. Here are some of our veggies we've got in our garden; beans, kumara, cucumber, carrot, corn, lettuce and strawberries. (By Jayden and Korbin)

Thank you for reading one of our first blog posts and we hope you stay to read more...

Created by Jarhlia, Ryan, Isabella, Macy, Korbin, Katie and Jayden

Students with a Vision at Matapu

Exploring Me in my Environment

Students at Matapu are busy creating a vision map for action in their environment.  They have lots of ideas for changing and improving their school including; decorating, planting food, planting for bees and birds and fixing up some areas they have identified around their school. 

Posing in the garden

One of their major projects of late has been planning and redesigning their garden area. To make this idea reality their next step is thinking of ways to fundraise the money needed. 

Plans for a nature trail and pathways

Kapai Matapu school - it was great to visit and see all the fabulous effort you are putting into your environment. 

Harvesting Our Kumara

On our Celebrate Autumn day a few weeks ago, our tamariki had a wonderful time harvesting the kumara that we had planted in tyres at kindergarten. They were so excited to pull off the top tyres and start digging around in the lovely, soft soil to find the beautiful kumara.

 

We found just a few small ones at first, but we weren't discouraged!

 As soon as we moved the last tyre, we we started finding bigger kumara.

 There were roots everywhere!

 

Look at our beautiful kumara harvest! They grew absolutely beautifully in the tyre stack!

 

Our tamariki took great pride in their very own kumara.

The next day, we used our kumara to make kumara and orange salad, which was delicious!

Our garden and orchard

We created the garden with the help of volunteers of our community who were Mr Allerby Mrs  Allerby Mrs McQueen and Mr and Mrs George. the teachers Mrs Claridge and Mrs Moratti helped too. the students of waitoriki school all participated in the making of the garden as well.

We used various materials such as wood chicken wire and nails for the fence to keep the rabbits out. we used bamboo as tripods for our beans to climb up. we also planted lots of different types of beans even heritage beans!

the whole idea of making the garden was to keep us busy with our enviro stuff and to have a big school lunch with food from our garden.

Room 5 at Matapu: Weeding

Room 5 at Matapu: Week 9: Over the last few weeks we have been weeding our gardens and planning what to plant in them. last week we all got into small groups and loo...

Vege garden and fruit orchard

  We grew seedlings given to us by a local business - Bunnings. Everyone in the whole school was involved. The parents were invited to come and help themselves to the free plants. We grew the vegetable plants just to be different to other schools. We cooked apple and rhubarb pie (with a side of ice cream!) It was delicious. Another class, grew spring onions. They took them home to make chicken noodle soup.

We have a group of parents who come to school to help weed our gardens. I call them the "Busy Bees."

By Claudia